| Abstrakt: |
To what extent do people classified by police as ‘offenders’ and those they classify as ‘victims’ overlap, thus creating a third category of individual targets for crime and harm reduction called ‘victim-offenders’? Leicestershire police records in the 3-year period 2014–2016 were compiled on all 117,766 individuals who were identified as either victims or offenders in all 159,702 crimes in which one or more individual victims were named. A 730-day-at-risk tracking period after individuals’ initial appearance in the data set was examined for the tracked cohort of 42,916 individuals who entered the data set in 2014 only and were ultimately identified in 62,336 individual-victim crimes. Each individual who entered the data set from 2014 to 2016 was classified as (only) a victim, (only) an offender, or (both) victim and offender in separate events. We designate the latter category as victim-offenders. The total count of criminal events and total recommended days of imprisonment value of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CHI) were calculated for each individual, both for crimes committed and victimizations experienced. Individuals who entered the data set in 2014 were tracked for 730 days from their first recorded offence or victimization. All individuals were ranked, by both crime counts and CHI values, from highest to lowest. From 2014 to 2016, victims comprised 89.9% of the 117,766 individuals ever appearing as victims or offenders, offenders comprised 7.9% and victim-offenders were 3.2%. In 2014, all 38,318 individual victims and 4598 offenders were placed into the 730-day tracking period in which 1825 individuals became victim-offenders, or 4.2%. Initial offenders were seven times as likely to become victims (17.9%) as initial victims were to become offenders (2.6%). Victim-offenders had 74.5% higher average harm scores and 68% higher average crime counts than the overall 2014 entry cohort, with 65% of victim-offenders’ harm a result of their victimisation. Only 417 ‘high harm-high volume’ individuals experience or cause the most crime harm as well as the most crime, of whom 49.9% (208/417) are victim-offenders, 33.3% (139/417) victims and 16.7% (70/417) offenders. Opportunities to reduce crime and harm through targeting police and partnership resources on the ‘power few’ (Sherman, Journal of Experimental Criminology, 3(4), 299–321, 2007) can be enhanced by identification of victim-offenders and testing prevention strategies appropriate to this third category of people. |
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