Crime statistics

Crime statistics quantitatively describe levels of criminal behaviour in society, but should not be thought of as objective measures of crime itself. Official statistics, or those generated by law enforcement agencies, report the crimes reported to police. They are reasonably accurate for crimes such as auto theft, but systematically underestimate under-reported crimes such as sexual assault.

To better estimate levels of crime, criminologists and other scholars conduct victimisation and self-offending surveys that ask the public about their direct experience of crime, as victims and offenders respectively. However, even these crime statistics are thought to underestimate actual levels.

Crimes unmeasured by crime statistics are called the dark figure of crime.

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