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TERM | DEFINITION
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| Alleged offender | Persons or organisations believed, with some degree of corroborating evidence, to have committed a certain offence(s) and charged with the commission of that offence(s).
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| Appeal Court | A court in which appeals against findings or sentences are heard.
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| Call for service | A call made to the authorities (usually the police) to report certain behaviours or to request some assistance. Some things that come to the attention of authorities will relate to non-criminal activity (suspicious behaviour, for example, or a request for information or assistance) but are useful to identify in terms of their effect on operational decisions and resources. Other things will be reported to authorities as criminal behaviour. The "prima facie" approach is usually applied at this stage, whereby the authorities accept all reports at face value.
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| Case | One or more defendants against whom one or more charges have been laid and which are heard together by a court as one unit of work. The charge(s) usually relate to the same criminal incident and appear together on one indictment.
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| Charge | An allegation laid before a court by the police or other prosecuting agency that a person or corporation has committed a criminal offence.
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| Classification | A set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories into which members of a population can be divided. |
| Collection | A set of related statistical activities that constitute a complete and essentially self-contained statistical process including:
- the gathering of data from respondents, whether directly by census or survey, or indirectly as an administrative by product or from another collection;
- the processing of data in such a way as to add value to the information content if only by selection and re-formatting; and
- the production of one or more statistical products which could, in principle at least, be disseminated to the public.
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| Criminal incident | A criminal incident is comprised of an offence, or an act that is in breach of the criminal law. The criminal incident may be a breach of State/Territory or Commonwealth legislation and multiple offences within a single incident may involve a combination of local and federal crimes. A criminal incident must involve at least one offender but will not necessarily involve a specific victim. Offences such as drug use and traffic offences are examples of victimless offences. When a victim is involved, that victim may be an individual, multiple individuals or a group (for example, an organisation or a family). Offences are grouped into the same unique occurrence if they are committed by the same person(s) and if: they are part of actions committed simultaneously or in sequence over a short period at the same location; or they are part of interrelated actions, with one action leading to the other or being the consequence of the other; and they involve the same action(s) repeated over a long period of time against the same victim(s) and come to the attention of the police at one point in time.
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| Data | Statistical data referring to individual population members or to the population as a whole.
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| Datase | A data table, including metadata, which refers in essence, to a single population of statistical objects, a set of classificatory data items which categorise members of the population and a set of parametric data items.
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| Data variable | An attribute of a population member or of the population as a whole.
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| Defendant | A person or organisation against whom one or more criminal charges have been laid and that are heard together as the one unit of work by a court level.
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| Hearing | The presentation of a particular matter before a court.
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| Higher Court | An Intermediate Court or Supreme Court, both of which hear serious criminal charges relating to indictable offences.
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| Intermediate Court | A Higher Court level (known either as the District Court or County Court) that has legal powers that are intermediate between those of the Court of Summary Jurisdiction and the Supreme Court and deals with the majority of cases involving serious criminal offences. An Intermediate Court is presided over by a judge and has original jurisdiction to hear trial and sentence matters relating to most indictable offences. In some States, the Intermediate Court may have appellate jurisdiction over decisions made in the Court of Summary Jurisdiction. Not all States/Territories in Australia have an Intermediate Court.
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| Lower Court | A lower court level (also referred to as Magistrates' Court, Local Court or Court of Petty Sessions) that deals with relatively less serious charges and has the most limited legal powers of all the States and Territory court levels. A Court of Summary Jurisdiction is presided over by a magistrate and has jurisdiction to hear trial and sentence matters relating to summary offences. Under some circumstances, this court level may also deal with the less serious indictable offences known as "minor indictable" or "triable either way" offences. Courts of Summary Jurisdiction are also responsible for conducting preliminary (committal) hearings for indictable offences. Not all alleged offenders will appear before a lower court; some will move straight into the higher court system.
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| Metadata | Data describing data.
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| Offence | Act considered prima facie to be in breach of the criminal law.
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| Offender | A person or organisation found guilty by the court of committing (a) certain offence(s).
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| Penalty | Penalties include directions or orders issued by a judicial officer or law enforcement officer that are imposed as a consequence of a person or organisation being accused of committing an offence or being proven guilty of committing an offence and which generally result in action that restricts or compels that person or organisation in order to fulfil one or more of the following sentencing objectives: punishment; restitution/reparation; rehabilitation/care; prevention/containment/supervision. Penalties are used to describe the outcomes of court hearings (for persons proven guilty) and the type of correctional program or penalty enforcement action applied to ensure compliance with court orders.
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| Plea | The initial formal statement by, or on behalf of, the defendant in response to a criminal charge that has been laid in a court. The nature of this response indicates whether or not the defendant intends to contest that charge.
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| Population | A set of objects of interest.
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| Prisoner | A person with a court-issued authority held in full-time custody under the jurisdiction of an adult corrective service agency.
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| Recorded crime | Crimes recorded by police after they have been reported to, or otherwise detected by, police.
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| Re-offender | A person who has previously been involved in the criminal justice system, has been found guilty of an offence, and who re-enters the system as an alleged offender in another criminal incident. This subsequent incident may or may not involve the same type of criminal behaviour as did the previous criminal incident.
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| Reported crime | A event reported to the authorities by a victim, a witness, an offender or some other party. Events may be reported as one thing, only to be reclassified later as another (as in a report of something stolen that later turns out to have been misplaced). Changes in reported crime rates may be influenced by changes in community attitudes to the reporting of crime, police procedures or crime reporting systems, rather than by changes in the incidence of criminal behaviour. An incident may or may not come to the attention of the authorities. In the case of victimless crimes, the incident may simply remain unknown and hidden. Even incidents involving victims may remain undetected if the victim does not realise that the incident has occurred. Incidents that are discovered by victims may or may not be reported to the authorities for a variety of reasons: the incident may be regarded as trivial, the victim may be ashamed of telling anyone about the incident, or perhaps the victim feels that nothing can be done about the incident.
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| Sentence | A particular type of penalty handed down by the court, usually involving actual or suspended imprisonment.
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| Supreme Court | A Higher Court level that deals with the most serious criminal charges and has the greatest legal powers of all the State and Territory court levels. A Supreme Court is presided over by a judge, and has jurisdiction to hear trial and sentence matters relating to all indictable offences. In States which have an Intermediate Court, the Supreme Court is usually reserved to deal with the most serious indictable offences, such as murder. The Supreme Court may also have appellate jurisdiction over decisions made in the Court of Summary Jurisdiction or the Intermediate Court.
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| Suspect | A person or organisation suspected, with as-yet insufficient evidence, of committing (a) certain offence(s).
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| Unit record data | Data for individual population members.
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| Victim | Person, groups of persons, or organisation(s) that have been the target of criminal behaviour.
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| Witness | A person(s) present at the commission of a crime as neither offender nor victim.
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