CSO crime figures

THE Central Statistics Office (CSO) will formally take over the function of publishing garda crime statistics this autumn, it was confirmed yesterday.

The CSO, which is implementing a radical overhaul of the system, expects to start producing data in October or November.

The CSO will first publish a back series of statistics, which will provide quarterly figures from 2003 to the present for all recorded crime.

“We’re confident we’ll be publishing the quarterly figures from the third quarter of this year, in October/November.

“At that stage we’ll publish quarterly figures going back to the first quarter of 2003,” said Ger Healy of the CSO.

He said he expected the annual report for 2006 to be published by the end of February 2007.