National crime survey six years late

A NATIONAL survey considered crucial to establishing the true levels of crime in Ireland will not be conducted until 2008 — six years after the Department of Justice was urged to commission it.

The National Crime Victimisation Survey was first proposed in 2001 by the National Crime Council (NCC), an independent body established by the department to offer policy advice to the Government.

The NCC recommended that the department commission the first survey in 2002 and repeat the exercise every two years after that.

It said the survey would help form a truer picture of the amount of crime in Ireland.

The official source of crime statistics, the annual report of the Garda Commissioner, is considered an incomplete record because many crimes go unreported. The amount of unrecorded offences is known as the “dark figure” of crime.

According to the Institute of Criminology at University College Dublin, “it is generally accepted that one crime is recorded for every four committed.

The NCC separately proposed the establishment of an Expert Group on Crime Statistics, but the department subsequently forwarded the survey proposal to that body for further consideration rather than commission it immediately.

The expert group reported back in 2004, and recommended that a central crime statistics unit be established to take responsibility for the survey as well as the integration of Garda figures and data from other sources.

The unit has now been established within the Central Statistics Office (CSO), and will undertake the first survey in 2008.

In the meantime, the CSO will continue with a smaller-scale study of the issue. The CSO included a series of questions about crime and victimisation as part of its quarterly national household survey in 1998 and 2003, and will do so again later this year.

The last time the CSO conducted the exercise, in the fourth quarter of 2003, it found that one in 20 people said they had been a victim in the previous year of theft with violence, theft without violence, or physical assault [excluding domestic violence or sexual assault]. That was double the amount in the fourth quarter of 1998, when one in 40 said they had been victims of one or more of those crimes.