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Together with its consortium partners, Gallup Europe are to launch the pan-European Crime and Safety Survey report*

The EU International Crime Survey (EU ICS) is a programme to look a householders' experience with crime, policing, crime prevention and feelings of safety in a large number of EU member states. This survey interviewed a representative sample across Europe about selected offences (car theft, motor theft, burglary, robbery, assaults, drugs etc.) residents have experienced over a given time. The survey was interested whether or not incidents are reported to the police, and indeed, the reasons why people do or do not choose to notify the police. The EU ICS thus provides both a more realistic count of how many people are affected by crime and - if the surveys are repeated – a measure of trends in crime, unaffected by changes in victims' reporting behaviour or administrative changes in recording crime. By collecting social and demographic information on respondents, EU ICS also allows analysis of how risks of crime vary for different groups within the populations, in terms of age, income levels etc.

The aim of the study

The ICS was set up to serve three main aims - and they remain as pertinent now as when the project started:
• To provide an alternative to police information on levels of crime
• To harness crime survey methodology for comparative purposes
• To extend information on who is most affected by crime.

To provide an alternative to police information on levels of crime

Offences recorded by the police can be problematic for comparing crime in different countries for three reasons. Firstly, victims report the vast majority of incidents the police know about. Thus, any inter-country variance in victims' tendency to report crime to police undermines comparisons of the amount of crime counted by the police in different counties. Secondly, there may well be differences in the amount of reported crime which is actually recorded by the police in different countries. Thirdly, official police statistics vary because of differences in legal definitions, recording practices and rules for classifying and counting offences. These limitations are well established. For the crimes it covers, the ICS asks about incidents that by and large accord with legal definitions of offences. It generally accepts respondents' accounts of what happened - or at least the accounts they are prepared to give to interviewers. Thus, it allows for a broader definition of crime than the police, who, if incidents are reported to them, are likely to filter out those which may not be estimated to merit the attention of the criminal justice system or meet the legal or organisational demands for reasonable evidence.

To harness crime survey methodology for comparative purposes

Despite efforts made in a number of countries over the past 20 years to develop 'crime' or 'victim' surveys to assess national or local crime problems, these reports only allow a limited comparative interpretation. The objective of the EU ICS was to provide a fully standardised questionnaire enabling a truly comparable analysis of data. And as it has always been the intention to repeat the ICS over time, it promises additional information in trends in crime in different countries.

To extend information on who is most affected by crime

By collecting social and demographic information on respondents, the EU ICS also aims to assess how crime risks vary for different groups. Variance in age, income levels and so forth are considered. It therefore offers a major advantage to police statistics, which usually only provide limited documentation of the characteristics of victims. Moreover, with its cross-national perspective, the survey allows us to see how far the determinants and consequences of victimisation are the same in different jurisdictions, or whether country differences are evident.

* Please note that the EU ICS report is not released yet. It is currrently under assessment by the European Commission.

Newsletter Coordinator • Aurélien Renard, Business Development Manager •

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