ABSTRACT
Police records are concerned with two basic descriptive categories; the ‘child’ and the ‘events’; typically offence ‘events’, in which children become involved. The items of information collected by the police can conveniently be handled under three major heads: the offence behaviour, the individual offender, and groups of offenders. Details of behaviour and the individual child can be drawn directly from the official paperwork in the form it is first recorded. Traffic offences appear in the table in cases where the child has committed a number of offences and the first one recorded is a traffic offence. The Criminal Statistics, annual police returns and the whole tradition of empirical criminology emphasize and encourage a view of the juvenile offender as an individual. All the remaining offence categories were compared in relation to the following attributes: sex, age, number involved in event, number of offences in event and previous court appearances.
