Abstract
Official criminal justice statistics in Australia and New Zealand are produced by police, courts and corrective service agencies as an administrative account of their performance and annual service delivery achievements. Now more widely accessible than ever before, these official crime statistics often depict property, dishonesty and drug offences as among the most common crime types even though other sources indicate interpersonal violence as the most common. This chapter explores the issues related to the definition and categorisation of officially recorded common crime types, and explores, through a critical lens, the challenges of crime measurement and reporting for public consumption and policy development in both countries.
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Payne, J., Hutton, F. (2017). Mapping Common Crime. In: Deckert, A., Sarre, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55747-2_8
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