A Starting Point…

Maybe I assumed, maybe I had great expectations, or perhaps it was simply an incorrect appraisal, but it looks like visiting Ljubljana just after our opening seminar in Vienna probably won’t yield the best results for my story about young criminals.

No big stories in the newspapers about young gangs and criminals, no gossip among the journalists that follow the topic and no obvious point to start from.

However, it hasn’t been a complete waste of time. That’s because, I’ve started to learn something about the numbers.

In 2009, a total of 17,171 people accused of committing criminal acts in Slovenia. Of those, 1,439 were between 14 and 17 years old, according to the Slovenian interior ministry. In other words, 8.38 per cent of suspects are minors.   

During the same year in Sarajevo, around 600 criminal offences were committed by around 250 suspects aged between 14 and 17, according to the study Children in Conflict with the Law authored by Dr Armin Krdzalic.

In 2010, the Sarajevo Canton’s interior ministry reported that it had successfully cut the climbing rate of youth delinquency by 25.6 per cent from the year before.

All of which seems a little strange, when one considers that Sarajevo’s citizens generally believe crime is rising, properties are at risk of vandalism and that the streets are ever more violent and dangerous for people to walk.

Perhaps more revealingly, the statistics from Sarajevo Canton show that 38.5 per cent of offenders were minors. They also revealed that repeat offending appears to be on the increase. Those previously convicted now commit three crimes on average, compared to two crimes the year before.

This rate of recidivism is comparable to those of Belgrade and Zagreb, notes the same report.

The majority of offences, around 80 per cent, are against property, such as vandalism and burglary. After property, comes public order and traffic violations and only then do we reach violent crime against a person in crime league tables.

Yet only 20 to 25 per cent of crimes were approved for prosecution – showing a disproportionately large gap between the number of complaints and the number of cases brought to court.

At first sight, it appears there are only three possible conclusions to be drawn, and they are highly unsatisfactory for all concerned. First, the courts and prosecutors are failing to correctly bring cases to court. Second, the police are failing to properly investigate cases in order to prosecute them. The third would be a mix of both.

While perhaps all three are in fact doing their jobs properly, there must be good reasons as to why so few cases reach court. Searching for answers to that question in particular, seems a very good point to start from.

Ahmed Buric is a journalist and commentator from Sarajevo who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

He will be writing regular updates on his investigation into youth crime, reoffending and rehabilitation in the region.