Official Crime Statistics

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The official crime statistic recorded by the Home Office estimate 5.4 million crimes in Britain in 2006/7. However, 11.3 million crimes in 2006/7 was estimated by the British Crime Survey (Home Office, 2007) this therefore raises the question: why official statistics fail to provide an accurate measures. Crime is an act committed by an individual which can be a part of an offence and is punishable by law. Laws contain sanctions, that are penalties or other means of enforcement, that are used to make sure laws are not disobeyed (Joyce, 2009). If a law is broken, it is the Criminal Justice System’s duty to deliver justice for all and this is done by declaring the guilty of a criminal offence, punishing the guilty and helping them to stop reoffending …show more content…

In spite of the victim reporting the crime to the police, the police may decide not to record the offence this may be because they believe the crime is too minor to be recorded, the victim may not be willing to provide evidence in court or because the police are obliged to give Home Office only notifiable offences, meaning crimes that can be tried by jury, many crimes such as motoring offences are not notifiable, therefore cannot be recorded onto the official statistics. The practice of cuffing also causes a crime not to be recorded. The practice known as cuffing is when a police officer deliberately, decided to not record a crime in order to avoid time-consuming procedure of filling out a crime report for minor incidents. Ultimately, the final reason for a crime not to be recorded is because not all offences are investigated by the police, for example crimes such as fraud, can be invested by the Department of Work and Pensions Fraud Investigation Service or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, some crimes including fraud do not enter the official crime statistics. (Joyce, …show more content…

Offences that are asked to be taken into consideration by a court is also classified as a sanction detection. If a person convicted for an offence admits the crime and asks for similar cases to be taken into consideration by the court where there are information that validates the offender to that crime. If a detection is classified as a sanction detection the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) may not take forward proceedings or the offender may not be found guilty or given a lighter sentence (Taylor and Elkin, 2013)

When there is sufficient evidence to charge a person for an offence and no further action has been taken against the offender but has been counted as cleared up, non-sanction detection is raised. From April 2007, there are now only two ways non-sanction detection can be claimed, if the offender dies before proceedings could be completed and if the CPS rule not to prosecute (Taylor and Elkin,

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