A major Garda clampdown on prolific burglary gangs has seen a huge fall in the number of break-ins across the State in the first half of the year.
However, it has also been revealed that almost one in five crimes reported to the Garda last year was not recorded as a crime on the force’s computerised PULSE database.
And one third of crimes committed last year that the Garda was satisfied it had detected resulted in no action against the suspect.
It means gardaí believed they knew the identity of the person who carried out the crime and had marked the crime as detected, or solved, but nobody had been charged.
In many cases while Garda members believe they know who carried out a crime there is not enough evidence to begin a prosecution.
The new information on crime trends in the first half of this year and on the quality of the crime statistics recorded by the Garda last year are contained in separate reports released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Wednesday.
There was no overall detection rate available for all of the crimes the Garda investigates.
However, the CSO said of the crimes marked as detected by the Garda, 37 per cent had no charges or summonses attached, meaning not prosecution had begun.
The latest crime stastics show that burglaries fell by 26 per cent in the 12-month period to the end of June compared with the corresponding period last year.
When burglary rates for the first six months of this year are compared with the first six months of last year, the decrease is 36 per cent.
There were just over 14,000 burglaries and related offences recorded in the first six months of last year and just over 9,000 in the first six months of this year.
While some crime categories increased in the 12-month period to the end of June, the prolonged fall in rates of reported crime evident since the start of the recession has continued.
The key trends in the 12-month period to the end of June include:
- Murders and manslaughters fell by six cases to 33 killings.
- Sexual offences rose by 13 per cent, with rape up by 12 per cent and sexual assault increasing by 6 per cent.
- Kidnapping and related offences increased by 3 per cent to 141 cases.
- Robbery, extortion and hijackings fell by 11 per cent, to 2,289.
- Theft and related offences were down by 26 per cent, to 7,581 crimes.
- Drug crime was unchanged at 15,485 offences after rapid falls in recent years.
- Weapons and explosives offences fell by 12 per cent to 2,209 crimes.
- Public order crimes were down by 5 per cent, to 31,237 offences.
The separate report on the quality of the Garda’s crime statistics from last year represents the second time the CSO has effectively audited the force’s figures.
The results of the first audit were published last year and related to the 2011 Garda crime figures and methods of recording crime then.
The audit of the 2011 figures took place after the Garda Inspectorate had three years ago expressed such concern about the reliability of the Garda’s figures that the CSO stopped releasing crime statistics for a period.
CSO crime statistician Tim Linehan said the Garda had improved since the audit report published last year relating to the 2011 crime figures.
“The amount of non-recording of crime on PULSE fell very slightly,” he said of the audit published today relating to the 2015 crime figures.
The Garda was found in the previous audit as having misclassified 7 per cent of crimes as “complaints”, and so outside the official crime figures.
However, Mr Linehan said when the Garda’s data for last year was examined there was a significant improvement, with only three per cent of crimes incorrectly classified as complaints.
The quality review of the Garda’s 2015 crime data practices found that across seven major crime categories - assault, burglary, criminal damage, public order, robbery, theft and unauthorised taking of a vehicle - 3 per cent of offences were wrongly classified as to other crime categories.
And a further 2 per cent of cases in those seven categories contained “insufficient information to determine the correct classification”.
