OPINION:Crime statistics yield important insights if they are placed in an appropriate context and interpreted critically
LEON RADZINOWICZ, one of the most influential European criminologists of the 20th century, observed in 1945 that statistics on crime were “difficult to compile, difficult to comprehend and difficult to interpret”. The passage of time has not eased these difficulties.
What we think of as the official picture of crime tends to be limited to those matters dealt with by An Garda Síochána. But there are numerous other bodies that deal with criminal activity. These include the Revenue Commissioners, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Safety Authority, to name but three. If we are to appreciate the extent of crime and the challenges it poses to society this wider context must not be neglected.
Furthermore, the Garda figures are not a count of all crimes that come within the force’s remit.
For a criminal event to end up as a statistic it must first be reported by a member of the public or come directly to the attention of An Garda Síochána. Reporting rates have improved over time along with more widespread telephone ownership (making it easier to pass on information) and higher levels of insurance cover (necessitating a formal report to facilitate a claim). In combination, these factors have contributed to more crimes getting on to the books.
It is also clear that victims are less reluctant to come forward today. This is particularly the case for sexual abuse, where the stigma, shame and silence of the relatively recent past have diminished. Where sexual offending is concerned an upward trend is explained, in part at least, by increased reporting.
Nevertheless, it remains the case that many crimes go unreported. Surveys reveal that this is generally because victims believe the incident was too trivial, or they feel that gardaí could not – or would not – do anything to assist. Occasionally, a decision not to report is motivated by fear of reprisals or a determination to resolve matters independently.
In the event that a crime is reported, the next step is for it to be recorded. Research has been carried out in other countries to explore why crimes that become known to the police do not end up as part of the official record. This results from a practice known as “cuffing” (because the allegation disappears up the officer’s sleeve). The extent to which this practice skews the figures in Ireland is not known.
Even when a crime is reported and recorded there is no guarantee that it will be reckoned for statistical purposes. This is due to the application of what are known as “counting rules”.
The “primary offence rule” dictates that where two or more offences are disclosed in a single episode, only the most serious one is counted. The “continuous offence rule” means that if there are repeated incidents involving the same victim and offender, only a single crime is counted. The tally that emerges at the end of this process of attrition becomes the focus of much political, public and media interest. It must be remembered that it represents a fraction of all crimes committed.
Making sense of aggregate patterns using these final tallies requires care. It is crucial to take account of demographic changes and to think in terms of rates rather than raw numbers. The increase in the national population over the past 20 years makes this especially important when carrying out retrospective or comparative analyses.
Caution is also required when considering rare events such as murder where a large percentage change can result from a small numerical difference.
Shifts in policing priorities can affect crime statistics, especially for offences unlikely to emanate from victim reports.
For example, if drink driving is targeted the number of such offences recorded will almost certainly increase, even if the underlying level of this behaviour remains stable (or falls). Concentrating resources on road safety may mean they cannot be deployed to combat public disorder which, as a result of reduced attention, may show a fall in the annual returns even if it is on the rise.
Similar problems affect crime statistics wherever they are collected. They are not peculiar to Ireland. What is different about the Irish situation is the lack of alternative sources of information. Surveys of victimisation and self-reported delinquency, which offer complementary perspectives, are carried out infrequently, and there is a paucity of research in the area of policing.
It would be highly misleading, therefore, to view the Garda figures as constituting a measure of the ‘true’ amount of crime. But it would be equally wrongheaded to dismiss them as worthless. While imprecise, they yield important insights if placed in an appropriate context, viewed over time, supplemented with other sources and critically interpreted.
Taking account of all the aforementioned caveats it is possible to come to several broad conclusions.
The first is that crime rates go down as well as up. There were sustained falls in recorded crime in the 1980s and 1990s, so another downturn would not be unprecedented.
Secondly, the nature of crime changes over time. Some crimes that were a cause of great concern in the past, such as robberies involving syringes, which were prevalent in the 1990s, have virtually disappeared. Other crimes that hardly existed in the 1990s, such as the distribution of child pornography over the internet, have become prominent.
Thirdly, compared with its European neighbours, Ireland no longer has an enviably low level of recorded crime.
The compilers of the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics go to great lengths to gather comparable data from across the Council of Europe. The latest edition of this source book, published in 2010, showed Ireland’s overall level of recorded crime was above average. The homicide rate was a cause of particular concern, having risen steeply at a time when the trend in many other countries was in the opposite direction.
In his book Guardians of the Peace, Conor Brady described Ireland in the 1950s as a “policeman’s paradise”. Quite evidently this is no longer the case. But, as the series of reports in The Irish Times this week shows, neither is the situation spiralling out of control.
IAN O'DONNELLis professor of criminology at University College Dublin.