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POLICE PROCEEDINGS - COURT ACTIONS

In addition to presenting data about offenders, data are also presented about the number of proceedings that police initiated against offenders during the reference period. An offender may be proceeded against more than once by police during the financial year. Police proceedings represent a count for each separate occasion on which police initiate a legal action against an offender. Depending on the type of offence committed, police will either initiate a court or non-court action. This publication only presents data for a subset of the total number of police proceedings - police initiated court actions. Court actions largely comprise the laying of charges against an alleged offender that must be answered in court. Offenders may be taken into custody, granted bail or issued with a summons for these charges pending an appearance in court. It should be noted however, that not all court proceedings initiated by police will proceed to a criminal court. The proceeding may be withdrawn or changed from a court to a non-court action.

Non-court actions comprise legal actions such as informal or formal cautions/warnings, conferencing, counselling such as drug diversionary schemes, or the issuing of penalty or infringement notices, which do not require an appearance in court.

Pending data quality improvements, information about police initiated non-court proceedings may be available in future releases. For more information about police proceedings refer to the Glossary.

Excluding Western Australia, police initiated 302,871 court actions against offenders during 2007-08. Queensland had the highest number of court proceedings (37% of the total), followed by New South Wales (27%) and Victoria (18%).

Acts intended to cause injury, theft, public order, and illicit drug offences were the most prevalent principal offences for court proceedings for most states and territories. Acts intended to cause injury accounted for the largest proportion of all court proceedings in the Northern Territory (34%), New South Wales (33%), South Australia (22%) and Tasmania (21%). Theft was the most prevalent principal offence for court proceedings in Victoria (23%), while public order was the most prevalent offence in Queensland (27%) and the Australian Capital Territory (23%).