Challenges in collecting data

It’s very difficult to process and systemize data since there is no unified method for the Western Balkans on the hole despite the same nature of reports. Moreover, the differences are visible even in the one national report.

For example, in the report by the Serbian Ministry of Interior, there is a discrepancy in the data when reference is made to the number of committed crimes or registered persons for the same year in various reports.

For some types of criminal offenses, such as money laundering, in Serbia’s reports after 2012, as well as in Kosovo’s reports after 2014, there is no data on the extent to which these crimes have been committed or how many of the perpetrators have been reported.

The area in which the data is complete for all the monitored countries is traffic safety – the number of traffic accidents, the number of injured and dead persons, which made it possible to review the data both at the national level and at the regional one.

Combining multiple branches of crime in the reports of one police, or their separation in the reports of another, made it difficult to compare them.

In the reports for the Kosovo police, there are no precise figures for the corruption criminal offenses, but the corruptive offenses are always seen together with some other unlawful activities.

Also, there are criminal offenses that are not recognized by all the systems and/or are not recorded in these reports, so this data could not be utilized using a comparative analysis method.

High-tech crime is recorded in all reports of the Serbian Ministry of Interior, but it does not appear in the reports of other ministries, or at least not every year.