CRIME IN ISTANBUL FROM WORLD WAR I TO THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REPUBLIC ACCORDING TO THE DATA OF POLIS MECMUASI

Istanbul is a difficult city to control due to its social, economic, demographic and geographical structure. Especially after the Balkan Wars, it became even more difficult to maintain its order and safety. In addition to some social and economic reasons, the poverty brought by World War I and the years of occupation, and also the weaknesses inflicting the government mechanism resulted in an unprecedented increase in crime rates. Especially ordinary crimes like theft and battery significantly increased and deeply affected the social life of the city. In parallel to the Ottoman modernisation process, judicial cases began to be recorded regularly. One of these records was the crime statistics kept by police stations and regularly published in Polis Mecmuas？ (Ottoman Police Magazine). As a record of the judicial cases taking place in Istanbul, police statistics were kept monthly and they did not contain much detail. While basically focusing on the armistice years according to the records of Police Magazine, the current study is a statistical work aiming to reveal the numbers of crimes in Istanbul in the time period that covered World War I, the Armistice years, and the first few years of the Republic of Turkey. Presupposing that the crime rates increased in Istanbul in the mentioned time period, the study tries to determine the extent of increase in specific categories of crime