A Collection of National and International Crime Data

Most of this data is from the Preliminary data set for the Sixth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems as of 15 March 2000. The countries are ranked in order of crime rate per 100,000 persons, averaged over the three years sampled.

Travel safety advisories from the US State Department, plus the British Foreign Commonwealth Office were used to "sanity check" the data as far as possible for some non-Western countries (some data was rejected on these grounds). Backpackers and other budget tourists are an excellent litmus test of how safe a country really is! Note however that in some countries crime is concentrated in a few localities easily avoided by tourists, and so even the travel advisories are not a 100% reliable guide.

A few gaps have been filled from the websites of the countries concerned (e.g. France, Japan, and New Zealand) and provided links to breakdowns across states within those nations where appropriate, e.g. Australia and the USA.

To get to these websites, and to State by State breakdowns, just click on the country names in the tables. There are links to some countries that did provide data to the UN Survey that merit special interest, e.g. Switzerland and Australia.

The figures for France are for 1996, 1997 and 1998, rather than 95, 96 and 97 as in all other cases. Note also that the link for France is to a report in French, however what is being described in the tables can be worked out easily enough with the help of an online dictionary, e.g. Cambriolage is burglary, vols is theft, viols is rape, autres atteintes volontaires contre les personnes is robbery and coups et blessures volontaires is serious assault resulting in injury.

The data for Japan does not seperate out burglary, car theft and all other theft, this all comes under larceny, so keep in mind that the larceny figures for Japan are actually for ALL theft.

Due to variations in the definitions of some crimes, these statistics will only be indicative, and only the larger differences between countries/states concerned will be significant. For instance, a difference of ten percent will not be meaningful, whereas a difference by a factor of ten will be (i.e. where one country has a crime rate ten times that of another). The grand total recorded crime figures in some cases do not include all crime for some countries, so these should be compared with caution. NZ is one of these.

The USA is a special case, in that it is in reality a collection of states, all with differing legal systems and approaches to crime, and differing economic and social factors. Therefore the overall USA figures do not really tell us a great deal about the USA as such, you need to go down to the State level figures to see the effects of such things as gun laws, Three Strikes, etc, both of which are applied patchily and at very different levels across the USA.

I have filtered out data from Third World and wartorn nations as it is likely to be too unreliable for the purposes of comparisons. Another useful set of statistics is this international survey on crime victims done in 1996. This graph of International Homicide rates for 1992/93 from World Health Organisation data also gives a useful indication at a glance, although the data is slightly dated now.

There is also lots of useful data here in this 1999 British Home Office International comparison of criminal justice statistics. Even more comprehensive data can be found in their 1998 version of this comparison. Both these are pdf documents which require Adobe Acrobat. This site gives comprehensive links to international and some National sites.

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It would make sense to view this table in conjunction with the one below it, as in some cases robberies are recorded as assaults and vice versa.

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It would make sense to view this table in conjunction with the one above, as in some cases robberies are recorded as assaults and vice versa.

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This data is somewhat dependent on the definition of a serious assault, although for the UN survey it was generally defined as one resulting in injuries requiring medical attention.

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Note that rates of car theft are inevitably lower in countries with much lower than average levels of car ownership, such as mainland China, although this does not fully explain our extremely high rate of car theft. Japan has an even higher rate of car ownership than New Zealand, yet car theft is extremely rare there.

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Note that much burglary in South Africa goes unreported. Burglary is also somewhat affected by the type of housing most prevalent in a country - apartments are less vulnerable than Nz suburban style housing for instance. Japan is absent from this data set as burglary and other forms of theft are all rolled into one (yet their entire theft per capita figure is half what ours is for burglary alone).

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Treat the below figures with caution. Some of these do not include all crime in the total. Such countries include NZ, South Africa Spain and others.

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