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Is There a Crime Drop in Western Europe?

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Abstract

Combining data from police statistics and crime victim surveys, this article analyses the evolution of crime in Western Europe from 1988 to 2007. The results show that there is no general drop in crime. Property offences and homicide have been decreasing since the mid 1990s, while violent and drug offences have increased during the period under study. These trends highlight the limits of the explanations to the crime drop in the United States, which are based on the premise of a correlation in the evolution of all offences. The drop in property offences seems related to changes in the socioeconomic situation in Europe as well as to increases in security measures in households, and the reinforcement of private security. The increase in violent offences can be explained by the combination of several factors, including changes in youth’s free time provoked by the development of the Internet, changing demographics, and the rise of episodic heavy alcohol consumption and street gangs.

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Notes

  1. For example, Rossenfeld and Messner (2009) only analyse the evolution of burglary in nine countries according to Eurostat statistics from 1993 to 2006. Their study also ignores the vast majority of the European criminological literature on crime trends.

  2. The same method was applied to Northern Ireland and to Ireland. In the latter case, the procedure followed was opposite to the one described before as figures for 2003 – and the following years – in the 4th edition were higher than in the 3rd one.

  3. In the case of Spain, research has shown that Spanish police statistics are currently unreliable (Aebi and Linde 2010).

  4. Thus, in the case of Norway we used 1991 data for 1990, and in the cases of Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands we used 2006 data for 2007.

  5. Median rates have also been calculated but are not presented here. They show similar trends to the geometric mean but more abrupt shifts in them. The latter are explained by the limited number of countries included in the analyses, which introduces sudden variations in the mean produced by changes in the rates of the country or countries placed in the middle of the distribution.

  6. Minor differences with former analyses of crime trends in Western Europe (Aebi 2004a, b; Killias and Aebi 2000) are explained by differences in the countries included in the analyses and the use of the geometric mean instead of the median for the calculation of the rates per 100,000 population. However, the overall trends are similar to the ones found in those analyses.

  7. The same is true for police statistics on motor vehicle theft (for details on this topic, see Aebi 2004a).

  8. England and Wales, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland.

  9. It was beyond our means to access the five databases and combine different offences for each country and each survey in order to improve comparability with police statistics (e.g. add car theft and motor vehicle theft according to the survey before comparing them with motor vehicle theft according to police statistics).

  10. Rape was not included in the analyses as its definition deviates widely from the definition of sexual incidents used in the ICVS (Aebi et al. 2002). However, their evolution according to police statistics is presented in Appendix 1.

  11. Correlations shown are rank-order correlations (Spearman’s rho). The comparison was cross-sectional, covering countries for which ICVS data and Sourcebook data were available for 1999. The 12 countries compared included the eight countries for which both sources are presented in this article (England and Wales, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland) as well as Belgium and Denmark for which, currently, only one source of data is available for the whole period studied (Aebi et al. 2002).

  12. According to police statistics, the rates of rape followed a constant upward trend during the period under study. The rate for 2007 was 103% higher than the one for 1990 (see Appendix 1).

  13. The authors wish to thank John van Kesteren, who provided them with the figures required to calculate these rates (van Kesteren, personal communication, October 14, 2009).

  14. In 1990, completed homicides represented 33.6% of the total homicide rates; in 2007, they represented 31%.

  15. Among youths, this is shown by the main results of the second International self-reported delinquency study – ISRD-2 (Junger-Tas et al. 2010).

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  1. University of Lausanne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marcelo F. Aebi & Antonia Linde

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  1. Marcelo F. Aebi
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Correspondence to Marcelo F. Aebi.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Table 2 Geometric mean rates of police recorded offences per 100,000 population from 1990 to 2007 in 14 Western European countries, and percentage change (based upon unrounded data) between 1990 and 2007
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Aebi, M.F., Linde, A. Is There a Crime Drop in Western Europe?. Eur J Crim Policy Res 16, 251–277 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-010-9130-y

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