ABSTRACT
Faced with a suspected offender the police can decide to take one of three courses of action. Some of the older children in Bristol belong to a group of 62 offenders already in the care of local authorities of whom 20 were eventually adjudicated NFA by the police. Social services departments, unused to dealing with large volumes of work in the juvenile courts, found themselves following 1 January 1971, suddenly inundated with notifications from the police. The Criminal Statistics for England and Wales have recorded annual rates of cautioning since 1954. They deal only in raw totals and are flawed by the omission of ‘no further action’ decisions. Items like sex, age, specific offence and previous record were all available in police files in practically 100 per cent of the cases. Other descriptive details about the home backgrounds of children were less systematically assembled, and presumably less often referred to in the decision-making process.
