White paper on crime 2010 Part1/Chapter4

Chapter 4 Comparison of Crime Trends with Other Countries

This chapter compares crime trends with regard to the number of reported cases, crime rate, and clearance rate for major offenses including homicide and theft in Japan with those in four other countries, namely France, Germany, the United Kingdom (U.K.; limited to England and Wales; hereinafter the same in this chapter), and the United States of America (U.S.A.), all of which is based on official statistics made available.

In this chapter “major offenses” include:

Japan:

Non-traffic penal code offenses;

France:

Felonies and misdemeanors (crime et délit) excluding traffic offenses, etc.;

Germany:

Felonies and misdemeanors (Straftat) excluding traffic offenses, etc.;

U.K.:

Notifiable offenses (offenses that the police are obliged to report to the Home Office);

U.S.A.:

Violent crime and property crime (estimates).

The scope of what is considered a crime and the constituent elements of a crime (factors and conditions to regard an act as a specific offense) differs and the methods used to gather the statistics are not the same across all the countries. In addition, the crime trend may not appear sufficiently in the number of reported cases for specific offenses, etc. However, the use of such statistical data could furnish useful reference material for further analysis of crime trends in Japan by comparing it with that of the abovementioned four countries.