Recorded crime in the EU

Eurostat police-recorded offences: Offences recorded by the police in the twenty-seven EU member states, for eight offence categories: intentional homicide, serious assault, sexual violence, robbery, burglary, unlawful acts involving controlled drugs, fraud, and acts against computer systems. Eurostat publishes twenty-five categories; the other seventeen are not reported. The figures are annual and arrive about a year and a half in arrears, so this section is quiet for most of the year and then publishes a year's worth at once. Recorded offences are not offences committed. The count moves with how willing people are to report an offence, with how the police record what is reported, and with changes in law and counting rules, as well as with offending itself. A rise or a fall does not by itself establish that any of those has changed, and no brief here says it does. Eurostat publishes what each country supplies and does not harmonise recording practice between them, so figures for different countries are not comparable with one another. No brief here places one country beside another: a comparison is only ever a country with its own preceding year, from the same series and the same category, and it is withheld entirely where Eurostat flags either year as a break in series or a change of definition. Differences between years are given as a number of offences. No percentage change is published: on a small base a proportional figure reads as a large movement when the underlying difference is a handful of records.