#Crime in #Japan…

Posted on March 23, 2016 by weehingthong

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23 March 2016

21s21 seconds ago

Octogenarian pickpocket underlines Japan’s ‘grey crime’ crisis

The National Police Agency reported in July last year that crimes by pensioners had outstripped offences by juveniles in Japan (model released) Photo: Alamy

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Octogenarian pickpocket underlines Japan’s ‘grey crime’ crisis

Incidents of violent crimes committed by the elderly also increasing as gap between the wealthy and the poor widens

By Julian Ryall, Tokyo

2:38PM GMT 23 Mar 2016

The arrest of an 83-year-old woman for theft and a man aged 75 for assaulting a child in separate incidents have highlighted the growing problem of crime committed by the elderly in Japan.

The National Police Agency reported in July last year that crimes by pensioners had outstripped offences by juveniles in the first half of the year for the first time ever, with a significant proportion of the arrests for violent crimes.

Adding to the police statistics, Sato Kamiyama, 83, was arrested in Tokyo’s Ueno Station on Friday after being caught pickpocketing a wallet from a woman who was shopping.

“If I see a wallet, I’ll take it,” the suspect was quoted by TV Asahi as telling police. “I did it for the money.”

Mrs Sato is apparently notorious with police in the district – allegedly, her preferred method is to target women shopping in the food halls of department stores – and has been questioned on at least 20 other occasions over thefts.
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Crimes committed by the elderly appear to reflect the problems that face Japanese society at the moment, including a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor and the breakdown of the traditional family unit, in which grandparents often lived with the children rather than on their own.

A total of 23,656 people aged 65 or older were questioned by police in the first half of 2015, an increase of 2.7 per cent. In the same period, police investigated 19,670 incidents involving youths between the ages of 14 and 19, down 15 per cent.

The proportion of crimes by the elderly identified as “violent” by the police soared 10.8 per cent on the same period in the previous year, while murders and robberies were up 11.8 per cent.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/12202248/Octogenarian-pickpocket-underlines-Japans-grey-crime-crisis.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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    1. 26 Aug 2015

      Elderly offenders outnumber juvenile criminals in greying Japan (Reuters pic)

 

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Elderly criminals outnumber punk teenage criminals in Japan.

Japan: Elderly overtake teenagers in crime figures

By News from Elsewhere… …as found by BBC Monitoring
  • 16 July 2015

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Police in Japan have dealt with more elderly crime than juvenile crime in the past six months, it’s reported.

It’s the first time that people over the age of 65 have surpassed teenagers in crime statistics since 1989, when Japan’s National Police Agency started publishing age-related crime data, the Kyodo News Agency reports. Officers took action against more than 23,000 elderly people in the first half of the year, compared to fewer than 20,000 youngsters aged between 14 and 19, officials figures show.

Japan has seen a fall in overall crime rates over the past 10 years, but not among its growing elderly population. The new figures show that violent crime committed by the over-65s rose by more than 10% compared to the same period last year. Of the country’s 127 million people, more than a quarter are now of retirement age, but the government has warned that the figure is likely to grow significantly in the coming decades.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-33551146

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