Description

The Intergovernmental Committee on Drugs commissioned the Australian Institute of Criminology to review policing and non-policing data on the involvement of alcohol in crime and to identify options available for better understanding and measuring the magnitude of alcohol-related crime in Australia. One recommendation was to establish a national minimum dataset for alcohol-related crime. In relation to the impact of alcohol on Indigenous people as victims or perpetrators of crimes, the authors recommended that Indigenous status of victims and offenders be recorded as part of a NMDS. The current mechanisms of recording alcohol-related crime in various jurisdictions was surveyed. Only the NT police data appears to routinely identify Indigenous victims or offenders, and there is no uniformity currently across jurisdictions. Non-police data was also surveyed. The Crime Victim Survey does not distinguish between drugs and alcohol, and the 2013-14 Survey (for unspecified reasons) did not include households in Indigenous communities