Crime Statistics
Home >Crime Statistics
Prior to June 1, 2005 the Royal Virgin Island Police force recorded and counted crimes using a charged based method. This meant that we counted each charge brought against an offender as a crime. This was despite the fact that the incident involved only one victim and that the major offence committed superseded most of prior minor offences detected from the report.
For example, under the old crime counting method, one incident of burglary may have also generated additional offences which we also counted as a crime i.e. Burglary, Criminal Damage and, Theft. In this instance instead of the one crime recorded we would have shown three crimes.
We recognized that this was not a valid crime counting approach and was leading to inconsistencies with other forces and across similar reports being handled by different officers (whom might not prefer similar charges or even the same amount of charges for the reports).
To address this problem and to ensure our crime counting approach was in line with internationally accepted best practice, we adapted some standards to effectively guide the crime recording and counting practices of the Royal Virgin Island Police Force.
As the British Virgin Islands is an overseas territory of the UK and uses the same criminal codes (barring a few amendments) it was determined that the UK Home Office Counting Rules For Recorded Crimes should be used to classify crime.
Detailed information on the UK Home Office Counting Rules can be found at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/countrules.html where you will be able to access the General Rules and National Crime Recording Standards.
Whilst adapting these tried and tested counting rules resulted in significantly lower recorded crimes for 2006 when compared to the previous years, users of the RVIPF crime data can be fully assured that the statistics we prepare are now in line with internationally accepted and clearly established standards and are collated in a consistent and accurate manner. We take great care to ensure the public data we share is reliable and free from any kind of manipulation.
The Crime Statistics reports available at present can be downloaded by click the links below. To view these documents you will need to have Acrobat Reader installed which is available for free from: www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html