Plan to monitor repeat crime victims
In Britain, 4% of the population suffer about 44% of the crime and the situation in Ireland is likely to be similar.
Victim Support chief executive Lillian McGovern said they wanted to know the extent of the problem in Ireland, where crime was happening and who the victims were. “The gardaí have promised to put a plan in place this year that will allow repeat crime to be measured. We need to know who the victims are, so we can protect them,” she said. The British repeat crime figures were presented at a pan-European conference of victim support groups in Dublin by crime science expert Prof Gloria Laycock from the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London. Prof Laycock said the problem of repeated victimisation went unnoticed in Britain because of the nature of police recording systems, the fragmentation of police work, non-reporting by victims and the kind of arithmetic involved. “We didn’t realise the problem was there at all until we started analysing the data. It will continue to get worse if people don’t deal with it,” she warned.
She pointed out that on Liverpool’s Merseyside, over 20% of all non-residential burglaries were repeats. Prof Laycock said certain housing estates were repeatedly targeted, where thieves zoom in on houses that are exposed or remote and people are known to be careless about locking up and securing their property.
Interviews with 21 burglars established that 76% had gone back to a number of houses, mostly because they were familiar with the features of the house. The same applied to car theft. Prof Laycock said “cocooning” vulnerable people in what was really a mini-neighbourhood watch was an ideal way of protecting them.
With the permission of victims, police could alert nearby neighbours that they had been burgled or had been the victim of a domestic assault and ask them to keep an eye out for them. “There is evidence that works well and it gets the community involved with each other again,” she pointed out.
Unfortunately, she said, police in Britain were not doing enough to tackle the problem of repeat victimisation, which was on the increase. “The police data systems in the UK are just not good enough and I suspect the situation is similar in Ireland. They cannot tell from their data how many repeat victims they have got. They also need to know what to do about it and they are not terribly good at that either.”
Prof Laycock said they had been publishing research on the problem for 15 years and were still trying to get their police force to treat it seriously.
“Repeat victimisation starts very early with school bullying. We just need to get to the point where we just don’t accept these kind of repeated attacks,” she said.
