Recorded Crime - Offenders

NAME OF ORGANISATION
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

OVERVIEW
The collection presents information on the number and characteristics of alleged offenders aged 10 years or more who were proceeded against by police during the 12 month reference period (financial year). Offender counts are based on counting a person only once, no matter how many separate times they were proceeded against by police. Characteristics include: age, sex, principal offence, Indigenous status, number of times proceeded against, along with information on police initiated proceedings against offenders.

PURPOSE
To provide a measure of the number of alleged offenders who come into contact with the criminal justice system at an early stage in the process, namely the "investigation and charging" stage.

SCOPE
The collection covers all alleged offenders aged 10 years and over who had been proceeded against by police during the 12 month reference period (financial year). The scope of the collection excludes the following:

• person less than 10 years of age;
• organisations;
• offences that come under the authority of agencies other than state and territory police such as Environmental Protection Authorities, etc; and
• proceedings initiated by Australian Federal Police.

Conceptual framework
The collection covers all alleged offenders aged 10 years and over who had been proceeded against by police during the reference period. The scope of the collection excludes the following:

• person less than 10 years of age;
• organisations;
• offences that come under the authority of agencies other than state and territory police such as Environmental Protection Authorities, etc; and
• proceedings initiated by federal police.

• counts of offenders who had been proceeded against by police
• demographic data (age and sex)
• Indigenous status for New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory for 2007-08; with the addition of Queensland from 2008-09.
• principal offence by age, sex and Indigenous status
• number of times proceeded against by age, sex and Indigenous status
• offender rates by age, sex, principal offence and Indigenous status
• counts of police initiated court and non-court proceedings by principal offence and sex

The main classifications used to collect and produce data about offenders are:

• Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC)
• Method of Proceeding (MoP)
• National Offence Index (NOI)

  Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC): ANZSOC provides a uniform national framework for classifying offences across Australia and New Zealand for statistical purposes. The classification is a hierarchical structure allowing for varying degrees of detail to be published depending on the level of detail in the source information. Associated with each classification are coding rules which ensure that the counting of information is consistent across states and territories. ANZSOC replaced the previous Australian Standard Offence Classification (ASOC) in 2011. This was a name change only - the content of the classification remained the same as in the 2008 edition of ASOC.

  The offence information in the 2007-08 issue of this publication related to the 1997 edition of ASOC. The ABS released a revised edition of the ASOC in 2008 (second edition). Offence information on the revised ASOC was implemented for the 2008-09 offenders collection, and included revised 2007-08 data on the revised ASOC basis. For further information about ANZSOC refer Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (cat. no 1234.0).

  
  Method of Proceeding (MoP): The method of proceeding describes the type of legal action (court or non court) initiated by police against a person. There are two types of legal actions; court and non-court actions. The method of proceeding classification is a hierarchical classification.
  
  
  National Offence Index (NOI): NOI is a tool which provides an ordinal ranking of all ANZSOC Groups by perceived seriousness in order to determine a principal offence. The purpose of NOI is to enable the representation of an offender by a single offence in instances where multiple offences occur within the same incident or where offenders offend on more than one occasion in the reference period. For further information about NOI refer National Offence Index, 2009 (cat. no 1234.0.55.001).
  
  

Date of Action: Data are compiled on the basis of the date that police took action or proceeded against an offender (e.g. the date the offender was charged, the date the offender was cautioned etc). The date the offender was proceeded against by police may not be the date when the offence occurred, or the date when the offender came to the attention of police. In some jurisdictions the data may reflect the date of record creation rather than date of action, however, this does not have a significant impact on the comparability of data across jurisdictions for offenders as there are no major lags between the two dates.

Principal offence: Offence information presented in this publication relates to the principal offence allegedly committed by an individual offender during the reference period. These statistics are not designed to provide a count of the total number of individual offences that come to the attention of police.

- For the offender counts, where a single offence is processed by police on a single date, the offender is assigned that offence as their principal offence. Where multiple offences are committed within the same incident on a single date by an offender, the offender is assigned a principal offence based on the most serious offence within the ABS National Offence Index (NOI). Offenders proceeded against by police on more than one occasion in the reference period are also assigned a principal offence on this same basis.

- For the police initiated proceeding counts, offenders who are proceeded against more than once in the reference period are assigned a principal offence for each separate date of police action.

GEOGRAPHIC DETAIL
Australia
New South Wales
Victoria
Queensland
South Australia
Western Australia
Tasmania
Northern Territory
ACT

Comments and/or Other Regions
For the initial release of 4519.0 relating to the 2007-08 reference period, data for Western Australia was not available, and therefore there was no national data. For the 2008-09 issue, national 2007-08 data was included, along with 2008-09 data.

Frequency comments


COLLECTION HISTORY
Although a CMS profile exists for the 2002-03 cycle, the publication was never released as it was decided that further work was required to understand some concerns relating to scope and coverage and juridictional capacity to provide data according to the statistical requirements of the collection.

The 2007-08 reference period represents the first issue to be released for the collection. As data for Western Australia was not able to be extracted in accordance with the statistical requirements of the collection, no national totals were available for the 2007-08 issue. Indigenous status data was provided for New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory; based on an ABS assessment Indigenous status data for the other jurisdictions was not considered to be of sufficient quality to meet national reporting requirements.

From the 2008-09 cycle, national data became available for offender counts but proceedings data was not published for Western Australia due to data quality concerns. National offender data for 2007-08 was possible with the release of the 2008-09 issue of the publication as Western Australia provided data for the 2007-08 period.

Investigations were undertaken into the quality of non-court proceedings data as part of the 2008-09 processing cycle. As a consequence of the investigation, the quality of the non-court data presented at the aggregate level was considered to be comparable across all jurisdictions and a decision made to include both court and non-court proceedings counts in the publication.