Crime reporting – the problem of forming system of reasons for initiating a criminal case

The article considers crime reporting and the types of information sources that form its content and have the legal status of reasons for initiating a criminal case. It is noted that the report on the crime that has been committed or is being planned one received from other sources as a reason for initiating criminal proceedings in the criminal procedure law in the post-Soviet era was formed subject to the social significance of information about a crime received from individual state and non-state agencies and giving individual sources of information the status of an independent reason for initiating criminal proceedings. At the same time, in the content of the reason for reporting the crime committed or being planned one received from other sources, there is no term «preliminary investigation bodies», emphasizing the addressee of receiving information about the crime, so it indicates the possibility of supplementing it with the terminology mentioned above. It is argued that it is inappropriate to raise information about a crime to the status of an independent reason for initiating a criminal case, if this information is received by the preliminary investigation body from a prosecutor, tax authority, or other state or non-state agency, which is part of the reason for reporting a crime that has been committed or is being planned one, obtained from other sources. From the standpoint of the philosophical doctrine of the categories «content» and «form», the position is argued that the procedural form of fixing information about the signs of a crime, containing sufficient data to initiate a criminal case, received from another source or directly discovered by the preliminary investigation body, is a report on the discovery of signs of a crime.