White paper on crime 2012 Part1/Chapter4

Chapter 4 Comparison of Crime Trends with Other Countries

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 Home Office is notified of by the police);

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) and the methods used to gather the statistics differ in each country. In addition, crime trends may not appear very clearly in the number of reported cases for specific offenses, etc. However, this comparison can be useful as a reference for further analysis of crime trends in Japan.