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INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION

This publication presents statistics relating to the number and characteristics of alleged offenders (hereafter referred to as “offenders”) aged 10 years and over who have been proceeded against by police during the 12 month reference period 1 July 2016 to 30 June 2017, as well as selected data for the reference periods 2008–09 through to 2015–16. This includes their age, sex, Indigenous Status, principal offence, and how often they have been proceeded against by police within the reference period, as well as a count of proceedings comprising court and non-court actions.

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 43–49).

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 reflect 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 50–84 of the Explanatory Notes.

For ease of reading, some ANZSOC offence categories have been abbreviated throughout this publication. See paragraph 47 of the Explanatory Notes.

Certain offences are excluded from the Recorded Crime – Offenders collection. For further information about the scope and counting methodology of the collection refer to paragraphs 3–15 of the Explanatory Notes.


COUNTING UNITS

Recorded Crime – Offenders features two distinct counting units: offenders and proceedings.

Offender counts

For the offender population, a person 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 a person committed offences on two different dates during the reference year and police proceeded against them for each separate incident, the person would be only counted once.

Offender rates presented in this edition are calculated using Estimated Resident Population (ERP) data (derived from Australian Demographic Statistics (cat. no. 3101.0)) and expressed as the number of offenders per 100,000 population aged 10 years and over. Where rates are presented by jurisdiction, sex, age or Indigenous Status, the rates are calculated using the population of the relevant group. For example, the statement '1,918 offenders per 100,000 persons' should be read as '1,918 offenders per 100,000 persons in the relevant group aged 10 years and over'.

Police proceeding counts

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


CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The Offenders, Australia chapter presents statistics about all offenders aged 10 years and over who were proceeded against by state/territory police during the period 1 July 2016 to 30 June 2017 at a national level, and also for each state and territory.

The Youth offenders chapter presents data relating to the characteristics of offenders aged 10–17 years.

The Indigenous Status, selected states and territories chapter presents data relating to the Indigenous Status of offenders. Indigenous Status data are presented for New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory (refer to paragraphs 27–30 of the Explanatory Notes).

The Police proceedings, selected states and territories chapter presents data on the number of separate occasions where an offender has had a legal action initiated against them during the reference period. Police proceedings data are presented for all states and territories except Western Australia (refer to paragraph 69 of the Explanatory Notes).

The Experimental Family and Domestic Violence statistics chapter presents experimental data on offenders of family and domestic violence related offences, as flagged by police or where the relationship of offender to victim falls within a specified family or domestic relationship. Data are presented for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory (refer to paragraphs 31–42 of the Explanatory Notes).

The Explanatory Notes provide detailed information on the data sources, scope, counting rules, data comparability and other technical matters associated with this publication.


CHANGES IN THIS ISSUE

Data have been revised since the previous issue of this publication as follows:

• 2015–16 reference period data as a result of updated information received from Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory.
• Northern Territory data for the 2008–09 to 2015–16 reference periods to reduce the level of offenders being coded to an “unknown” principal offence. See Explanatory Notes 76–78 for further information.
• Queensland data for the 2014–15 to 2015–16 reference periods to remove out of scope records originally coded as unknown offences. See Explanatory Note 57 for further information.

• Reordering of some tables within data cubes for consistency across data cubes.
• Addition of a second reference period of data to some tables which previously presented only a single year of data to enable comparison as well as to account for potential revisions to data.
• Reduction of some tables from the full time series to two years where there is little change for the relevant data items over time.
• Additional ANZSOC subdivision data presented by jurisdiction for the current reference period.
• Addition of tables presenting principal offence by sex for each jurisdiction for the full time series.
• Northern Territory data has been reintroduced into the Police Proceedings Data Cube. See Explanatory Note 79.