Developing Public Safety and Crime Indicators in Taiwan Bill Hebenton & Susyan Jou & Yao-chung Chang Received: 10 December 2008 / Accepted: 24 November 2009 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Many countries and international organisations (for example, the USA, England and Wales, Japan, the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) have developed measures of public safety and measures of the effectiveness of criminal justice agencies. This paper briefly considers the background to such comparative developments and relates these to the specific contextual conditions of Taiwan. We report the results of a study which reviewed the state of empirical indicator availability in Taiwan and sought to develop an indicator framework for those charged with the governmental task of ‘public safety’. The paper concludes by considering how such a framework can be implemented in Taiwan. Keywords Taiwan . Crime . Comparative . Public safety . Risk management . Indicators . Statistics Introduction One of the major functions of crime statistics is to provide a social indicator. Crime statistics serve this function by providing estimates of the level and change in one aspect of the well-being of a nation, state, or locality. Crime and the fear of crime impose costs on citizens. Conversely, public safety from crime and from fear of crime has a positive value to households, as evidenced by the willingness of the public to pay both through taxes and private precautions for safety improvements. A measure of public safety has the potential not only to summarise the level of security that an area enjoys but also to provide Asian Criminology DOI 10.1007/s11417-009-9081-8 B. Hebenton (*) Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies, School of Law, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK e-mail: Bill.Hebenton@manchester.ac.uk S. Jou Graduate School of Criminology, National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan Y.-c. Chang Regulatory Institutions Network, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia