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RECORDED CRIME – OFFENDERS, 2012-13

This publication provides counts of the number of offenders aged 10 years and over who were proceeded against by police during the period 1 July 2012 to 30 June 2013, as well as selected data for the reference periods 2008-09 through to 2011-12.

The statistics are based on data extracted from the administrative records of state and territory police agencies. National statistics require a level of uniformity when compiling data from different states and territories. As such, data from the Recorded Crime – Offenders collection have been compiled according to national standards and classifications to ensure comparability (see Explanatory Notes, paragraphs 40-49).

Responsibility for policing largely resides with individual Australian state and territory governments, and therefore different legislative offences and practices may exist across jurisdictions. Although national standards and classifications are used to produce these data, there will be genuine differences across state and territory jurisdictions for some offence types. The data largely reflects the administrative processes of police agencies in dealing with offenders. Furthermore, the range of court and non-court actions available to police when proceeding against offenders varies between states and territories. For more information, refer to paragraphs 49-71 of the Explanatory Notes.

Recorded Crime – Offenders features two distinct counting units: offenders and proceedings. More information about these concepts can be found in the Explanatory Notes, paragraphs 11-12.

Offender counts

For data relating to the profile of offenders, an offender is only counted once regardless of how many times he or she may have been dealt with by police during the reference period. For example, if an offender committed offences on two different dates during the reference year and police proceeded against the offender for each separate incident, the offender is only counted once.

Police proceeding counts

Data relating to police proceedings represent a count for each separate occasion on which police initiate legal action against an offender. Offenders may therefore be counted more than once during the reference period for police proceedings.