Study on the policy-relevance of existing crime data

Resumen

At present, there is a lack of high-quality comparative data on crime trends. This fact inevitably hampers the adoption of evidence-based policies. Several initiatives have already been launched by the European Union in the past years, underlying the necessity of gathering reliable data on crime in addition to using such data for developing European criminal policy. The purpose of this paper is first, to envisage a study of the initiatives that have already been undertaken. Next, a brief description of the decision-making process in criminal matters at the European level will be provided, with the aim of determining the point in the entire process at which crime data should be used by policymakers and whether the available crime data are currently being integrated into the development of criminal policy. Finally, since the results of our research showed that European policymakers make little use of the existing data, the paper will analyse the main reasons for such limited use and provide some proposals to improve the degree of policy relevance of the data.