| 1.1 This
bulletin presents statistics on crimes and offences
recorded and cleared up by the eight Scottish police
forces in 1998. It forms part of The Scottish Office
series of statistical bulletins on the criminal justice
system. Statistics of crimes and offences recorded by the
police provide a measure of the volume of crime with
which the police are faced. For a variety of reasons many
crimes and offences are either not reported to the police
or are not subsequently recorded by them and so changes
in the number of crimes and offences recorded do not
necessarily provide an accurate reflection of changes in
the volume of crime committed (see Section 9 for more
details). Definitions of the terms and classifications
used in this bulletin are given in the Annex. Numbers in
the text have been rounded as appropriate. |
