International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 42

What recent property crime trends in Western Europe tells us about the crime drop
integrated police. Burglaries in other buildings (companies and businesses as well
as public and government buildings) are on a downward trend” (Kaisin 2013).
In the chapter dedicated specifically to burglaries, it states that in Belgium:
The number of burglaries in residences recorded by the police services in 2012
increased by 7.5% compared to 2011 and by 28.2% compared to 2008. It is the
highest number (75,268 cases) ever recorded by the police services since 2000. The
fight against burglary is and remains an essential priority for the police! In 2012,
for every ten thousand housing units, 155 domestic burglaries were reported. This
number was 145.5 in 2011. The increase is found mainly in burglaries of houses
(and not apartments, where the opposite trend can be observed) and in rural
communities. . . . The Federal Police noted other factors that help understand the
increase in the number of burglaries in residences recorded in 2012: the growing
influence of the economic crisis; the attraction of current gold and jewelry
prices on thieves (jewelry and money are the primary targets of burglars); the
internationalization of crime, which explains the presence of itinerant gangs of
perpetrators, mostly from Eastern Europe, which are active in Belgium. At the
same time, “local” thieves are also active (Police Fédérale, 2012).
In the English version of the annual reports of the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) of the
Federal Republic of Germany, titled Police Crime Statistics, one can observe that the number
of crimes of “theft by burglary of a dwelling” (as a translation of Wohnungseinbruchdiebstahl
in German) are equal to those for “domestic burglary” published by Eurostat in its issues of
Statistics in Focus.
Article 244 of the penal code that defines Wohnungseinbruchdiebstahl effectively
allows us to verify that it corresponds to the French cambriolage du domicile. Einbruchdiebstahl,
like cambriolage, refers to thefts involving forced entry. In German, the Wohnung prefix
indicates that the burglary took place in a house or apartment.
Each year, from 2005 to 2008, fewer than 110,000 Wohnungseinbruchdiebstahl were
recorded by the German police. In 2009, this number grew by more than 5% compared with
2008 and the increase continued in subsequent years: +6.6% over the year in 2010, +9.3%
in 2011, and +8.7% in 2012, resulting in a +33.1% rise over four years (Bundeskriminalamt
200–201).
For France, the sum total of “home thefts with forced entry” [cambriolages de locaux
d’habitations principales] and “secondary home thefts with forced entry” [cambriolages
de résidences secondaires] recorded by the police and the gendarmes gives the number of
“domestic burglaries” for Eurostat.
In the current state of available information, crimes of this nature have not had a
break in the series in 2012, when one of the French police forces, the Gendarmerie nationale,
launched a new application for data collection.
In 2007 and 2008, approximately 166,000 home thefts with forced entry (primary
and secondary) were reported in metropolitan France by the police or the gendarmes.
This number has since undergone four consecutive annual increases: it reached more than
234,000 cases in 2012, having increased by 40.1% since 2008 (+67,840 cases).
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