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Preparing for EU accession negotiations
Center for the Study of Democracy |
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| The crime situation in Bulgaria became an acute political question in the early years of transition to democracy. During the period 1990–1992 the police registered a three to fourfold increase in crime across the country. For some categories of crimes, the increase was as much as tenfold. In the past 15 years, for the media crime news reports were easiest to sell. At the same time, the stark reality was that almost every Bulgarian family became a victim of crime. These developments transformed the issues of the country’s crime rate and crime trends in one of most important political issues. For these reasons, the collection and interpretation of criminal statistics, took on increasingly political overtones. There is little public debate, though, about crime-rate data, the ways it is collected and interpreted. The report Crime Trends in Bulgaria: Police Statistics and Victimization Surveys uses a crime victimization survey as an alternative analytical tool to make an independent assessment of the crime situation in Bulgaria for the period 2001–2004. The crime victimization survey polls people’s experiences with crime. In the United States and in many EU countries government authorities or independent institutions have been conducting victimization surveys since the 1960s. Unlike official government crime statistics, the regular crime victimization surveys help the police and government authorities, as well as the public to understand: whether the official police crime data reflect the real crime rate and crime trends; the volume of the unreported crime; the reasons victims do not report crimes to the police; whether the police avoids registering reported crimes; the profile of the social groups that are most at risk of falling victims to crime. |
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