Minors reported and arrested

Records, not people

ISTAT publishes records of people reported, arrested or detained by the police, one per person per crime: someone reported several times in the year counts each time. The numbers say how many times a minor was named as the person who committed a crime, not how many young people are involved.

Reported does not mean guilty

A record is the start of proceedings, not a conviction. For minors the juvenile court decides, and it can close the case with a period of probation or on the grounds that the offence is too minor to matter. Children under 14 cannot be held criminally responsible, but they can still be recorded.

Why a share and not a rate per resident

This page does not calculate how many minors are recorded per 100,000 young residents, but what share of all the people reported or arrested for the same crime are minors. The share also depends on how many crimes adults commit and on how many young people live in a region.

Two time windows

Records of minors are published from 2004, those for the individual types of theft and robbery from 2006; records for all people, needed to work out the share, are available here from 2014. The years 2020 and 2021 were the Covid years: closed schools and restrictions on movement pushed almost every number down.

What is left out

Crimes that nobody reports, and those whose offender is never found: for thefts, more than nine in ten in Italy (see the deep dive on unknown offenders).

Sources

For the method behind the whole atlas: Methodology and sources.