White paper on crime 2011 Part1/Chapter4
This chapter compares crime trends with respect 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 are based on officially available statistics.
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 used to regard an act as a specific offense) differs and the methods used to gather the statistics are not the same in all the countries concerned. In addition, crime trends may not appear very clearly in the number of reported cases for specific offenses, etc. However, the use of such statistical data can be useful reference material for further analysis of crime trends in Japan by comparing it with that of the abovementioned four countries.