Figures can be misleading and more thorough research is needed, writes Carol Coulter.
When Michael McDowell became Minister for Justice one of the things he promised was the prompt publication of the quarterly Garda headline crime statistics. He has been as good as his word, even though the first sets of these figures in the early days of his tenure did not make comforting reading. Happily for the Minister, they have improved since, and recent figures have generally shown a steady, if uneven, decline in "headline" crime.
However, just as the first figures he published were not as alarming as portrayed by the Opposition (the increases resulted at least in part from the introduction of a new way of counting by the Garda Síochána), so the more comforting figures now emerging do not show the full picture.
As Mr McDowell has himself acknowledged, the way the crimes are categorised combines the most serious crimes with the trivial. No-one would doubt the annoyance and distress caused by the theft of a bicycle, or of an item from a shop or a car. But these offences are included in what are normally described as serious crimes, along with murder, manslaughter, rape and armed robbery. There can be no comparison with the impact on individuals of such crimes.
When the figures are compiled the total number of all the individual incidents, from the most serious to the most trivial, are aggregated. This year this system produced a figure of 96,095 individual "headline" crimes over the past 12 months, compared with 102,914 in the year up to March 2004, showing a reduction of 7 per cent.
Under this system of counting, a dramatic fall in one of the more common crimes, like burglary, can produce an overall drop in the percentage of crime, even if there is an increase in serious crimes like murder and rape.
Other crimes, like possession of a knife, fraud, revenue offences or public order offences, are not regarded as "headline", and do not make their way into the Garda statistics at all.
The Minister set up an expert group on crime statistics which reported last year. As a result he decided that the Central Statistics Office should take over the compilation of comprehensive crime statistics, drawing from several sources as well as the Garda Síochána. These would include the DPP, the Prison Service, the courts and probation service, as well as victim surveys.
There is also some doubt about the reliability of the Garda statistics that are published quarterly. A minority of the expert group expressed doubts about "the quality, reliability and accuracy" of Garda crime figures, and said that the group had not succeeded in examining the Garda collation of information on crime. One facet of this is the use of the "principal offence" rule in recording crime, where lesser offences during the same incident are not recorded. The minority sought, unsuccessfully, the ending of the distinction between "headline" and "non-headline" crimes.
Occasionally the Household Survey includes questions on crime, and these show a very different picture of people's actual experience of crime than that presented by the quarterly Garda statistics.
Despite the fact that crimes like murder, manslaughter and burglary have been falling in recent years, and that Ireland is, by international comparisons, a low crime society, Opposition parties seize on increases in some categories of "headline" crime to prove alleged Government failures in this regard.
Instead of focusing on these quarterly figures, it would be more useful in assessing the true levels of crime in our society and in developing appropriate policies if attention was given to thorough research in this area, and to a discussion of how to respond.