New South Wales Recorded Crime Data 1995 to 2009, Persons of Interest

The New South Wales Recorded Crime Data is a compiled record of crime data obtained from NSW police records. The data contain information on persons of interest (POIs) connected to the crime incidents from the year 1995 to 2009. This data was extracted from the NSW Police Service's Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS). This system is used for record-keeping for all police operations, not just for criminal matters. Prior to April 1994, the NSW Police Service used a different system for recording criminal offences. Recorded crime statistics for NSW for periods prior to April 1994 are not comparable with those for more recent periods. In this report: the counting units are recorded criminal incidents (except for murder and manslaughter where the counting units are victims) rather than recorded offences; and the data are categorised by date of reporting to police (or date of detection by police) rather than date of occurrence of the offence. This dataset contains the details at the time of the incident of a person of interest (POI) for an incident. Note that for offender police data, the year refers to the year in which the criminal incident or incidents were reported to police. For example, if an incident was reported to police in 2007 but the alleged offender was not apprehended and charged until 2010, the charge is recorded for 2007. Alleged offenders who are not legally proceeded against are not included in recorded crime data. Incident variables include type of crime incident, premises on which the incident occurred, type of drug associated with the incident, geographical location of incident, when the incident first occurred, when the incident was reported and if the incident was domestic violence related. A criminal incident is defined as an activity detected by or reported to police which: - involved the same offender(s); - involved the same victim(s); - occurred at the one location; - occurred during one uninterrupted period of time; - falls into one offence category; - falls into one incident type (for example, 'actual', 'attempted', 'conspiracy'). One incident may involve two offenders assaulting the same victim. This would be recorded as one assault incident. Alternatively, suppose a man reports to police that his neighbour demanded money from him, then assaulted him when he did not comply. For such an event, two criminal incidents are recorded because two distinct offence types are involved (demand money with menaces and assault) even though the same parties were involved at the same time and in the same place. For murder and manslaughter only, the counting units used are victims. Under the definition of a criminal incident (same parties, same time, same place, same offence and same incident type) one murder or manslaughter incident could involve two or more persons being killed. Because of the seriousness of these offences and their relatively small numbers, it was considered to be more appropriate to count the number of victims, rather than the number of criminal incidents. Hence, where one murder incident involves a person killing six people, six murder victims are counted. Recorded crime statistics for some offence categories do not accurately reflect the actual level of crime in the community. This is because the number of incidents recorded may be affected by extraneous factors which are not easily measured. In particular: * Many crimes which occur are not reported to police and will therefore not be recorded - for example, a large number of assaults, sexual assaults and robberies are not reported to police. * Recording of those offences which are detected by, rather than reported to police, are strongly affected by policing practices - examples of these are drug offences, drink driving offences, offensive behaviour and receiving stolen goods. Recorded rates for such offences do not accurately reflect actual rates. * Sydney Local Government Area, and therefore Inner Sydney Statistical Subdivision, has high recorded crime rates because, compared with other regions, the resident population is small relative to the number of people in the area. In other words the area has a high user population which is not reflected in the denominator of the rate calculation. * Recorded crime rates in Local Government Areas with small population sizes are not always a good indicator of offending. Crime rates in areas with populations under 3,000 may be unreliable and should be interpreted with caution.