Property crime in Bosnia and Herzegovina according to official statistics

Abstract

Property is one of the universally protected legal interests, which unrestrained use is safeguarded by basic legal principles and norms of international and national law. From historical point of view, illegal behavior directed at misappropriation, threatening or damaging the property rights and interests has always been at focus of attention in most societies and cultures. Given the endurance of its (legal) protection, and the great level of extensiveness throughout all social communities, respectively, property crime is considered as classical, conventional type of crime. Since it is a mass phenomenon, study on it implies, among others, inquiry of official crime statistics, which is often viewed as the most reliable data source on crime. This paper presents data on property crime in Bosnia and Herzegovina viewed through police and criminal justice statistics, and by using both absolute and standardized figures. Paper findings suggest quite consistency of property crime during the seven years observed period (2003 -2009), and the great proportion of property crime in overall crime figures. Furthermore, particularly worth mentioning is the finding that despite frequent media writings and reportings on discouraging property crime situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, average theft and robbery rates are in Europe actually three to four times greater than in our country, and fraud rates even ten or more times. Although this relation can be interpreted by other moments (e.g., different data collection methodologies), it is plausible to assume that the situation with the property crime is not as severe as it may appear in public. These data provide support for widely present proposition in criminology and criminalistics which holds that property crime dominates the crime landscape and that there are probably quite stable macro social causes of crime at large.