Despite frequent headlines reporting heinous crimes, the Justice Ministry's 2008 white paper on crime provides somewhat assuring figures. The number of crimes, excluding traffic-related offenses, declined for five consecutive years. But Japanese society faces a new problem. Crimes committed by elderly people have been rapidly increasing, although they are rarely heinous in nature. The government needs to fully understand why an increasing number of elderly people commit crimes and implement social policy measures that will help reverse this trend.
In 2007, the police recognized 1,909,270 crimes, a decrease of about 142,000 or 7 percent from 2006, and took action (mostly arrests) against suspects in 605,792 cases or 31.7 percent of all cases, up 0.5 percentage point from 2006. The percentage figure showing the police's investigative ability rose for six consecutive years after hitting a low of 19.8 percent in 2001.
The number of crimes recognized by the police peaked in 2002 at about 2.8 million cases but declined for five straight years after that. (If traffic-related crimes are included, 2007 saw about 2.69 million crimes, down 6 percent from 2006.) The police recognized 1,199 murder cases in 2007, the lowest in the postwar period, and took action against 1,161 suspects in 1,157 of the cases, or 96.5 percent.