ABSTRACT
Like all knowledge, official statistics must be analysed as a product. They are never mere givens to be taken as they are or else dismissed as inadequate. This chapter provides a critical engagement with the main quantitative indicators of crime in Scotland. Crime statistics matter for two main reasons: first, because they do tell people something real about the ‘problem of crime’, though they may need to rethink their understanding of that term; and second, because in seeking to describe that problem, they help to constitute it in the first place. In recent decades, the two main sources of quantitative information about crime in Scotland, as elsewhere, have been the statistics of crimes recorded by the police and the data offered by local and national crime surveys. Victimisation has a ‘stubbornly concrete’ quality. In reading crime statistics, of whatever kind, we should ask ourselves how the various elements identified above may be interacting to produce a particular picture.
