Formulation of the problem. Difficulties in the process of law enforcement of criminal law are caused not only by the establishment of the presence of all the elements of the crime, but also by the assessment of the entire act as a whole in order to establish whether it is socially dangerous. In theory and in practice, they mainly refer to court decisions that recognize or deny the possibility of recognizing an act as insignificant. This leads to subjectivism in the process of applying the norms of criminal law and entails not recognizing socially dangerous actions as a crime and releasing the perpetrator from punishment or unjustified conviction of the person who committed the act, although containing all the signs of a crime, but not being socially dangerous.

The purpose of the study is to concretize the concept of public danger. To do this, the author considers it necessary to solve the following tasks: to consider the structure of public danger, as well as the influence of the content of objective and subjective signs of the act on recognizing it as insignificant.

To solve the designated goals and objectives of the study, the author used the following methods: the study of documents (court decisions), systematization and generalization of various positions regarding the concept of public danger.

According to the author, in order to exclude the unjustified application of Part 2 of Article 14 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the law enforcement officer must take into account the structure of public danger. The structure of public danger is characterized by public harm - actually caused harm or the threat of its infliction (depending on the object, consequences and method of the crime), as well as the threat of committing a new crime. The likelihood of a person committing a new crime is determined by the motive, purpose, as well as his behavior before the crime was committed.

When assessing an act that contains the elements of a crime provided for by the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the courts do not need to establish the existence of a public danger of the deed, since it is presumed, but on the contrary, they must establish and cite the circumstances indicating its absence.