Latent crime and police statistics: The role of sense of security in the law enforcement work

Abstract

The social response to crime is implemented through crime control, that is, through the criminal justice system, crime prevention, law enforcement, and community and social programs and intervention methods outside the justice system. Examining the impact of the crime control system and institutions on crime is a relatively new trend in criminology, which is shown in the research presented in the paper. When researching the causality that causes crime, the attention of science is inevitably directed to the criminal justice system, primarily due to social phenomena such as the phenomenon of latent crime, and the conceptual paradox of subjective and objective security. In addition to examining the creation process of criminal statistics, the paper focuses on exploring the nature of latent crime and objective and subjective security. The relationship between subjective perceptions of security and the objective security situation in today's modern risk society is given a detailed evaluation. The question rightly arises as to what the police alone can do to counteract the deterioration in the sense of security and what other social processes are involved that go beyond their scope and objective scope of action. The subjective sense of security is difficult or impossible to separate from the latent crime in the given social environment or how law enforcement agencies respond to crime. If the quality of law enforcement is primarily determined by the effort to improve criminal statistics, the gap between objective and subjective security will naturally increase.