About 25 percent of Bulgarians or close to one in four persons was ready to report to the competent authorities about a committed crime or vandalism, a major Eurostat survey on the topic of crime in 2016 suggests, as quoted by BTA.

The average index of Europeans who declared will to report to competent authorities about a crime, criminal incident of vandalism witnessed by them, is roughly 15 percent, European statistics report. It has turned out that as per readiness to report on such acts Bulgaria is an undisputed leader across the European Union scoring 25 percent of readiness of its citizens. In Italy the percentage is 20, and in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, about 18. At the opposite end of the chart of readiness to report crimes are the Croats and the Poles with a rate of 5 percent.

The Eurostat figures of the share of people ready to report about crimes suggest that in EU cities one in every five residents (20 percent) is ready to cooperate in countering crime. In rural areas the level is almost three times lower with about 7 percent of residents expressing such readiness. Further, the analysis of Eurostat places Bulgaria among EU countries with relatively low costs for justice per capita. The highest share of funding for curbing crime is allocated in Switzerland – 450 euro per capita. The second country under this index is Luxembourg with 200 euro per capita. In Bulgaria and Hungary about 50 euro per capita are paid for this purpose, and the smallest amounts are spent in Cyprus and Romania – 25 euro per capita.

The analysis reports a few important points about the diverse picture of crime in which premeditated murder comes first. During the period under review premeditated murders in Bulgaria were 130, or 1.7 crimes of this kind per 100,000 people. The average index in EU is 0.7. The highest share of murders is seen in the three Baltic States Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia with 7 murder cases per 100,000 people, and the lowest share is seen in Great Britain and Austria with fewer than 0.5 murders per 100,000. The country with the largest number of registered murders is France reporting 1017 cases equaling a rate 1.5 per 100,000 people.

Compiled by Stoimen Pavlov

English Daniela Konstantinova