THE CENTRAL STATISTICS Office will publish crime figures for the first time in more than a year today. The office stopped publishing the stats due to concerns over the accuracy of information provided by the gardaí.
The publication of crime stats has been halted on a number of occasions following last year’s revelations that 89 homicides, dating back 14 years, were not counted due to an issue with how they were recorded on the police force’s Pulse database.
Today’s release of crime data will include revisions back to 2003 however it will be published in a new “Under Reservation” category.
The CSO said this label has been applied to reflect the fact that there are “data quality issues” in the underlying sources used to compile the stats.
“This approach of differentiating statistics based on quality concerns associated with the underlying data is consistent with other jurisdictions such as England and Wales,” the office said in a statement.
The office added that the figures may change following further revisions.
The issue first emerged in April last year when the gardaí said it completed a review of 41 deaths and had identified “minor” classification issues.
In June it emerged that there were actually 89 additional homicides that had not been included in official garda stats.
The crimes were related to dangerous driving causing deaths. Garda management said the error had no impact on how theses crimes were investigated.
Earlier this month two civilian members of the gardaí said they were “belittled” when they tried to voice their concern over the inaccurate recordings of homicides in the system.
Lois West, the Deputy Head of the Garda Síochána Analysis Service, and Senior Crime and Policing Analyst Laura Galligan were tasked with conducting a review of domestic homicide cases within the State between 2007 and 2016.
They told a joint Oireachtas committee that they uncovered a raft of problems within the force but when they reported the matters to the gardaí Policy Development Implementation and Monitoring (PDIM) their concerns were dismissed.
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