THE IMPORTANCE OF REPORTED CRIMES IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH
THE IMPORTANCE OF REPORTED CRIMES IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Summary/Abstract: In this article, we have proposed an analysis of that category of offense that includes all the facts that have a criminal appearance and that are brought to the attention of the criminal justice bodies through different reporting methods provided by law. This category of offense is important in criminological research, because such acts appear in the statistics of criminal justice enforcement bodies at various stages of criminal trials, before a final judgment or other solution of criminal investigation bodies is issued, by which the criminal nature is confirmed or disproved. However, as is known, for a good part of these facts, the bodies of criminal justice pronounce solutions of acquittal, termination of the criminal process or closure. However, the acts pending before the criminal justice enforcement bodies for which the criminal character is not confirmed should not be included in the criminal statistics regarding the totality of the crimes that are committed. In the specialized literature, all the acts that have a criminal appearance, brought to the attention of the criminal justice bodies, form the category of reported crime, unlike the acts for which the criminal character is confirmed, which fall into the category of convictions, also called judged crime. Considering the particular importance of criminological research in understanding the distinction between the facts that have a criminal appearance and the facts for which the courts establish by final judgments that they meet the conditions of an offense, in this article a more detailed analysis of the facts that fall under the category of reported crime is made.

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