Crime statistics are more than just a pile of numbers. Ever since the eighteenth century, it became clear that they are a vital source of information in the challenge to understand and fight crime. In recent decades, crime and the prevention thereof increasingly gained importance to governments who “set out to ‘manage’ crime”. Because more and more people got involved in crime statistics, we have experienced
what some call a “data explosion”. Nevertheless, for long, the focus of crime statistics was limited to a merely national context, thereby largely neglecting cross-national opportunities. Besides an interest
that is mainly confined to the national context, the rather low availability of timely, reliable and comparable data is also due to methodological difficulties. The major concerns with regard to cross-national comparison are the differences in offence definitions, differences in reporting and recording practices and the differences in counting rules. Nowadays, there are two evolutions towards filling this “cross-national data gap”. The first is the development of the European Sourcebook, the second the evolution toward survey methods.