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QUALITY DECLARATION - SUMMARY
INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
In November 1990 an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) was made between the Commonwealth and the states and territories concerning the establishment of the National Crime Statistics Unit (NCSU) as a National Common Police Service, with a role to initiate, coordinate and oversee the development and production of national uniform crime statistics. The statistics contained in this publication are derived from administrative systems maintained by the state and territory police.
RELEVANCE
Recorded Crime - Victims, Australia (cat. no. 4510.0) presents national crime statistics relating to victims of a selected range of offences that have been recorded by police during the period 1 January 2012 to 30 December 2012.
The 2012 publication marks the third year in the current time series. The 2010 publication reflected a break in series for the collection; therefore comparisons should not be made between data in this publication and victims data published prior to 2011.
The scope of this collection includes victims of attempted and completed offences classified to divisions and/or subdivisions of the Australian & New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC). Depending on the type of offence, a victim can be a person, a premises, an organisation or a motor vehicle. Selected offences include:
- homicide and related offences (including murder, attempted murder and manslaughter)
- assault
- sexual assault
- kidnapping/abduction
- robbery
- blackmail/extortion
- unlawful entry with intent
- motor vehicle theft
- other theft.
Outputs include:
- victim counts for selected offences (for Australia and states/territories)
- victim details (age of victim, sex of victim) for offences where the victim is a person
- Indigenous status and relationship of offender to victim is included for selected offences and selected states/territories
- type of location where the criminal incident occurred
- use of weapon in the commission of the offence
- victim counts for selected offences by outcome of investigation at 30 days
National data are available for all offences excluding assault. Assault data will only be available for the following jurisdictions; New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory.
For national comparisons of assault data the ABS recommends that the crime victimisation survey is used as this data is collected in a uniform way across jurisdictions, and is therefore not affected by differences in legislation, business practices or recording.
TIMELINESS
The Recorded Crime - Victims collection is conducted annually for a selected range of offences recorded by police during the reference period of 1 January - 31 December. Information from the collection is generally released within six months of the reference period.
ACCURACY
The collection has been designed to facilitate comparisons of states and territories through the application of national statistical standards and counting rules. However, some legislative and processing differences remain which may include different recording practices, legislation or policy across the various jurisdictions, including pro-active policing campaigns to encourage reporting by the public.
As a result of the findings from the Differences in Recorded Crime Statistics (DiRCS) project, the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was developed to address the lack of uniform practices in initial police recording processes. The NCRS, comprising a uniform set of business rules and requirements, was developed in collaboration with police agencies across Australia to guide the recording and counting of criminal incidents for statistical purposes.
In evaluating the implementation of the NCRS and statistical impacts visible in the Recorded Crime – Victims collection, the ABS compared these data with state and territory data obtained from the Crime Victimisation Survey, observing that the assault data provided by police still had residual differences between jurisdictions that affected comparability.
As a result of the different business practices across the states and territories and as part of the ABS ongoing commitment to ensuring national data comparability and quality it has been determined that assault data will only be available for those jurisdictions complying with the NCRS. Assault data will only be available for the following jurisdictions; New South Wales, South Australia, Northern Territory, Australian Capital Territory and Western Australia.
For national comparisons of assault data the ABS recommends that the crime victimisation survey is used as this data is collected in a uniform way across jurisdictions, and is therefore not affected by differences in legislation, business practices or recording.
COHERENCE
A National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) has been developed to address the lack of a uniform standard in the initial police recording processes. This standard complements the already established classifications and counting rules for the Recorded Crime - Victims collection to improve the level of comparability of these statistics across jurisdictions.
The collection uses the Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC) to classify offences for the 2012 reference period and applies a set of national counting rules to establish the number of victims. Due to differing scope and counting rules, the data in the Recorded Crime - Victims publication may not be comparable to data published in other national and state/territory publications.
INTERPRETABILITY
The Recorded Crime - Victims publication contains detailed Explanatory Notes, Appendices and Glossary that provide information on the data sources, counting rules, terminology, classifications and other technical aspects associated with these statistics.
ACCESSIBILITY
If the information you require is not available from the publication or the data cubes, then the National Centre for Crime and Justice Statistics may be able to help you with a customised service to suit your needs. Email: <crime.justice@abs.gov.au>
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