Statistics released to the public do not include crime rates. Reliable data that would include petty crime would, in any event, be difficult to obtain because many minor infractions of law and all but the more serious of personal disputes are not termed crimes and are tried before the hundreds of local judicial commissions.
A rough assessment of the overall crime situation can, however, be made from the concern expressed in the many speeches and articles published by government and party spokesmen. It is apparent that certain types of crime are considered to be adequately under control and occur infrequently enough to be statistically tolerable. There are, for example, few trials in the political category, such as those where dissidents are accused of attempting to undermine the authority of the regime or to subvert the population from the approved ideology. In an exceptional case (apparently at least his second serious offense) an engineer found guilty of passing economic information to a foreigner received a twenty-five-year sentence in March 1971 for espionage. Similar trials were a frequent occurrence during the early 1950s, but much of the publicity they have received since the mid-1960s has occurred because they have become so infrequent as to be noteworthy.
Furthermore, to emphasize the more moderate and strictly legal procedures adhered to by police forces and the judiciary, some of the 1950 political trials are being reexamined. Most of those sentenced to imprisonment from such trials have been amnestied, the largest group in 1964. A few of those who were executed are still being posthumously rehabilitated.
On the other hand, there is a greater percentage of crimes in the categories that are sometimes attributed to an improvement in the standard of living but that reflect dissatisfaction with the rate of the improvement. These include economic crimes—theft and embezzlement—misuse or abuse of property, and antisocial crimes and crimes of violence, which are committed most frequently by younger people. Party officials also deplore the prevalence of laxity in the use of state property and in the safeguarding of official information and documents.
Measures taken to combat crime have had varying degrees of success. Speculation is illegal, but efforts to prevent private sales of new and used cars at excessive profit have been ineffective. Cars two to five years old sell for more than their original cost. Crimes such as vagrancy, begging, and prostitution were, as of late 1970, defying the best efforts of the militia and the courts. This type of crime had been prevalent during the early post-World War II period but declined after about 1950. During the late 1960s it again began to increase. The militia has also encountered a problem in the amount of popular cooperation it is able to count upon. Individuals who have identified persons as having committed criminal acts have been subjected to reprisals. The militia has, however, been able to show good results against vandalism, pilfering, and petty theft. By mid-1971 crimes of that category had been reduced to pre-1969 levels.
The 1968 Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) invasion of Czechoslovakia generated a certain amount of disillusion that probably contributed to the increase, during the late 1960s, in attempts to emigrate illegally. An émigré reported that about 40 percent of the prison populations at Arad and Timisoara, or some 500 inmates, had failed in attempts to cross the border into Hungary. Most of them were reportedly twenty to thirty years old and were serving sentences of from one to five years.
Modern crime-fighting facilities have been introduced more slowly than has been the case in the more prosperous European countries. During 1970 the Ministry of Justice established the Central Crime Laboratory and two branch, or interdistrict, laboratories. All of them serve the militia, the security and armed forces, the courts, and the public prosecutors. They are equipped to assist in the investigation of all aspects of crimes except those where medical and legal services are required. They include facilities for handwriting, fingerprint, and ballistic analyses and analysis of documents (for counterfeiting or alteration) and for performing a number of other physical and chemical tests.
Traffic Control
Traffic control demands a sizable portion of police energies, although by 1972 highway use remained low in comparison to the rest of the continent. There had been few motor vehicles before World War II, and numbers for personal use or for motor transport increased slowly during the immediate postwar years. Since about 1955, however, both categories have become available at an accelerated rate.
In 1963 traffic was up over 200 percent (and in 1965 approximately 300 percent) from 1955 levels. Total numbers of vehicles increased at about 10 percent a year during the late 1960s, and the number of those that were privately licensed doubled during the two-year period 1968 and 1969. Encouraged by the government during approximately the same period, tourist traffic tripled.