Classification of type of offence

The standard classifies all punishable acts – also referred to as offences or crime – authorised by the Norwegian penal codes and special legislation. The standard largely follows the structure and legal terms in the current penal legislation, but also includes classifications based on historical, empirical and other statistical assessments. From the 1980’s and until present day, the police and other agencies in the justice sector have registered offences based on a pre-structured set of codes, also known as «STRASAK-codes» or «statistical groups». Since the introduction of this practice, more than 1 200 codes have been used to classify offences, and all historical codes are included in the standard. The time of offence can be decisive in deciding which penal legislation and corresponding set of codes is used in each individual criminal case. Thus, the statutory basis and corresponding codes included in the raw data can vary over time and between the various crime statistics. In some cases, such differences will be of utmost importance to the interpretation and use of the crime statistics. This is particularly of significance to “new” types of offences, which cannot be specified in the same way as in previous raw data and statistics due to not comparable or differing codes. A further description of which codes that make up the different types of offences can be found under «Correspondences» attached to each version of Standard for Type of offence. Over the course of 2015, substantial changes came about in the penal legislation, corresponding codes and to the registration practice in the police register. These changes necessitated the restructuring of the Standard for Type of offence from version 2015 and onwards. The subsequent changes in raw data and the standard has led to a number of breaks and shifts in the time series between several types of offences in the crime statistics after the statistical year 2014 (see About the version).

Type of offence 2015

From version 2015 of Standard for Type of offence, all offences are classified into nine groups of offences. These groups are further broken down into underlying levels of more specified types of offences. In its most detailed version from 2015 and onwards, the standard include about 150 unique types of offences. Previous versions of the standard contained two variants, with ten groups of offence and about 140 types of offences, which did not correlate into a joint classification of offences. Type of offence 2015 is adjusted to and made with emphasis on the Penal Code of 2005, which together with a new set of codes for registering offences came into effect on 1 October 2015. There are significant differences between the Penal Code of 1902 and the Penal Code of 2005 – both in content and in the way they are structured. The differences are even more evident for the corresponding codes used for offence registration in the police’ criminal case registers. Due to the new penal code not having retroactive effect, both sets of offence codes are in use after 1 October 2015. Criminal cases regarding violations of provisions dating back to before the introduction of the new penal code, are as a general rule registered with the offence codes and corresponding code names which were valid at the time of the offence. However, it will not always be possible to specify and classify these offences in the same way as for violations of the Penal Code of 2005. Thus, certain types of offences in version 2015 will exclusively be made up by offences derived from penal legislation dating from 1 October and onwards, and will for the most part include offences which are also committed after the new penal code came into effect. In the standard and statistics, such types of offences are specified with “(from 1.10.2015)” in the classification. Older offences which cannot be specified to the same extent as offences from the new penal code are allocated under and named as “other or unspecified” types of offences. The statistical content, and possibilities of specifying offences at the most detailed levels, will thus be determined by the scope of offences committed before or after 1 October 2015. This type of break in the time series will vary over time for the different types of offences, and differ between the various crime statistics. Where such breaks in the time series are identified – and thus creating problems for the utilisation of the crime statistics – the general advice is to use figures at a more aggregated level, where figures are less specified and to a lesser extent contain breaks in the time series.