The rising murder rate is the most telling aspect of the recent crime figures, writes Dr Paul O'Mahony
Mr John O'Donoghue had a comparatively easy ride as Minister for Justice over the entire five year period of the last government. A major factor shielding Mr O'Donoghue from criticism was the generally very positive official crime figures throughout the period.
The fairytale of significant year on year decreases in indictable crime had to end sometime and Mr O'Donoghue is extremely lucky that the dismal figures for 2001 have finally emerged on the new Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell's watch.
Of course, no one should be under any illusion about the relevance of these figures to the assessment of Mr O'Donoghue's performance as Minister for Justice.
He may have escaped a roasting in the media and at the hustings but his legacy must now be thoroughly reappraised.
These figures cast serious doubt over the former Minister's frequent boasts that his policies were highly successful at reducing crime.
Almost half of the apparent gains of the previous five years have been lost through the 18 per cent single year increase in headline offences in 2001.
Despite a huge increase in prison places and for a number of years a highly favourable economic and employment situation, indictable crime shows only a modest drop to 86,000 in 2001 from 90,000 in 1997, when Mr O'Donoghue took office.
While the latest figures retrospectively tarnish Mr O'Donoghue's reputation as Minister for Justice, they also present the new Minister - and the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne - with a major challenge.
So far he has shown a deft public relations touch, opting to take the figures at face value and fully accepting that there has been an upsurge in crime of all kinds.
He has even suggested that this new trend is to be expected because similar rises in crime have already been noted for 2001 in Northern Ireland and Britain.
On the other hand, Mr McDowell has also indicated that he is unhappy with some aspects of the compilation of Garda crime figures and would like to see more independent monitoring of the data collection system as well as the introduction of a biennial victimisation survey.
From a criminological perspective, this approach is to be commended because it challenges the myth that official crime figures are always a valid and reliable reflection of the actual incidence of crime.
There are many problems with the Garda statistics. Reliability and validity are known to vary very widely across different categories of crime.
We can more or less fully trust official figures for a few crimes such as homicide, but those for theft vary in trustworthiness depending on the amount stolen, the presence of insurance cover and whether the theft is white-collar or not, and those for vandalism and assault can hardly be trusted at all.
The official figure for homicide is very close to the true number of occurrences. However, the official figures for vandalism and assault are unknown but certainly the published figures are a rather small fraction of the number of actual occurrences.
The figure for the theft of cars, which are usually insured and of high value, is a far more accurate estimate than the figure for the theft of property from cars.
The main issue here is the public's willingness to report crime, their belief that the cost of reporting, which can be substantial, will in the end be worthwhile.
Perception is all important here in terms of the perceived seriousness of the offence and the perceived likelihood that gardaí will achieve anything. The evidence from the comparison of official figures with the results of victimisation studies, of which there have now been a number in Ireland, is that for some categories of crime such as sexual assaults, only a small minority of cases are reported to gardaí.
Similarly, studies have shown that many commercial companies and institutions, in order to maintain public confidence, are not prepared to prosecute employees or others, who have perpetrated fraud against them. But studies have also indicated that there is a problem with some types of crime because the Garda choose to officially record only a proportion of the offences reported to them. This might be a matter of a garda not believing a drunk or suspicious complainant or finding a complaint malicious or too vague and ambiguous.
The Garda are also free to exercise discretion in other ways, most importantly in deciding whether a crime such as assault be dealt with as a serious, headline offence or as an apparently much less serious non-indictable offence.
There are several times as many non-indictable assaults as headline assaults and all non-indictable offences tend to be discounted and receive very little attention. All of this means that we should be cautious when interpreting annual crime figures and particularly year on year changes.
While a few crime categories can be confidently compared across the years, in the case of most crimes we need to factor in the possibility of change in reporting and recording rates. Victimisation studies are particularly useful because they provide evidence of the extent to which people are willing to report a specific type of crime and of the extent to which the police do or do not record certain types of crime reported to them. For example the evidence suggests that much of the increase in sexual offences of recent years can be attributed to a greater willingness on the part of victims to report the crime.
As if all of this was not complicated enough and more than justified Mr McDowell's proposal to examine and revamp the official compilation of crime figures, the present situation is further confused by the current phased introduction of the computerised PULSE system and the change of nomenclature from indictable to headline.
The latter seems to be an unnecessary cosmetic exercise that is inviting sensationalist treatment, but it has also been accompanied by minor adjustments to the coverage of the serious crime category. In this context of change, it is highly likely that the system will throw up occasional statistical anomalies. For example, the 90 per cent increase in assaults in 2001 follows an almost equally dramatic 70 per cent decline in the previous year. This suggests that some form of readjustment has been made to correct a procedural problem of definition or classification in the system.
In general, the 2001 reversal to a negative trend across larceny, robbery, and burglary does suggest the end of a relatively sustained period of genuine decline in these areas of crime.
The five-year decline was probably related to the improved economy, the greatly enlarged methadone maintenance programme after 1996 and the increase in prison numbers. But the most accurate and reliable of all crime statistics are those for murder and manslaughter.
These have continued to tell a more negative tale throughout the last six years. The total figure for homicides made an incremental leap in the mid-nineties, increasing by about 50 per cent (to 46 in 1996 and 53 in 1997) over the fairly constant rate of around 30 per annum for the previous twenty years.
Not only has this increase been maintained but it has worsened to now stand at 72 in 2000 and 75 in 2001.
Dr Paul O'Mahony is the editor of Criminal Justice in Ireland (2002) published by the IPA and of other earlier books on the area.