Recorded Crime Detection 2018

Introduction

Recorded Crime statistics are produced on a quarterly basis by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

The Recorded Crime electronic publication and related tables provide statistical information on the volume and type of crimes recorded by An Garda Síochána.

Recorded Crime statistics are categorised by the Central Statistics Office as Statistics Under Reservation. Please see Statistics Under Reservation FAQs for further information.

Crimes where a suspected offender has been identified and sanctioned may be recorded as detected. Valid sanctions include charge or summons, formal and informal cautions (e.g. Adult Caution, Juvenile Caution), and fixed penalties (e.g. Fixed Charge Notice, Fixed Penalty Notice) for certain offences. A charge is a document detailing the criminal offence(s) a suspected offender is accused of following arrest. Once charged, a suspected offender must either be released on bail or detained until they appear in court. A summons is an alternative to a charge whereby a suspected offender is ordered to appear in court at a later date. Summonses are usually issued for less serious cases, where it is not considered necessary to arrest a suspected offender to guarantee that they appear in court.

There are some limited circumstances where a detection is allowed but a suspected offender is not sanctioned, e.g. the offender dies before they can be prosecuted, DPP decides that prosecution is not in public interest. These circumstances are outlined in An Garda Síochána Crime Counting Rules document reproduced at Crime Counting Rules (PDF 440KB)

Detection statistics provide a snapshot of the extent to which crimes reported to An Garda Síochána have been detected.

Statistics on other characteristics of recorded crimes are provided in other CSO publications. See more at Crime and Justice.

Due to the quality of the detection data having improved, more reliance can now be placed on the quality of the associated suspected offender data. CSO intends to analyse these data in detail and to publish, in 2020, statistics relating to suspected offenders (e.g. gender and age). It is also intended, subject to the underlying data quality supporting it, to present information on the offender profile as it relates to victims (e.g. the age and gender of suspected offenders linked to the age and gender of victims).

Source data

The Recorded Crime Detection 2018 publication is compiled from administrative records of crime incidents and sanctions recorded by An Garda Siochana on the PULSE (Police Using Leading Systems Effectively) and FCPS (Fixed Charge Penalty System) databases.

CSO receives a subset of the data held on PULSE and FCPS for the purpose of compiling crime statistics, and only receives the variables which are absolutely necessary for the production of official crime statistics and related quality assessments.

The Recorded Crime Detection 2018 publication is based on PULSE data extracted on 2^nd September 2019 and FCPS data extracted on 16^th March 2019.

The PULSE dataset is the same as used to publish Recorded Crime (RC) Q2 2019 on 27/09/201: Recorded Crime Q2 2019.

Notes on how Recorded Crime (RC) Q2 2019 statistics were produced are available at Background Notes.

For this publication, CSO has processed additional data relating to the detection status of crime incidents and suspected offenders, as well as records of charges, summons, Fixed Penalty Notices and Fixed Charge Notices issued by An Garda Síochána in order to compile statistics in respect of detected offences.

Crime recording rules and recording procedure for detections

An Garda Síochána Crime Counting Rules document states that a criminal offence can only be classified as detected for statistical purposes when one of the following are true:

• Criminal proceedings have been commenced against at least one person for the criminal offence
• Approval has been granted for a child to be dealt with in accordance with the Garda Juvenile Diversion Programme
• Additional specified grounds where a decision is made not to prosecute e.g. where there is sufficient admissible evidence to prosecute but an essential witness is unable to give evidence, or an offender dies before proceedings can be initiated.

There are other forms of sanction which, while not specified in the An Garda Síochána Crime Counting Rules document, have either been introduced or have become operational procedure since the Crime Counting Rules document was last updated. These include the use of Adult Cautions, informal cautions and Fixed Charge Notices as alternatives to prosecution in appropriate circumstances, and these are considered to be valid detections. 

PULSE Update 7.3, released on 25th February 2018, introduced new data governance controls in respect of recording detections. The mechanism for recording a detection on PULSE has changed. A detection is now recorded as an automated response to recording either a sanction against a suspected offender (e.g. a charge, summons, or caution) or, in a very limited set of circumstances, a verified exception whereby a suspected offender is not directly sanctioned (e.g. the offender has died). The new governance controls support more reliable data outputs in respect of detected crime.

These new governance controls support more reliable data outputs. It is important for users to understand, however, that the improved data quality constitutes a significant break-in-series for measuring crime detection rates in Ireland. Therefore 2018 detection rates cannot be compared with figures published from before this change.

The break-in-series occurred during Q1 2018, so figures published for 2018 will include a portion of the year where the old system was in use. It will be important for users to consider this when comparing future years with 2018. The CSO will ensure that users are reminded of this when it becomes relevant.

Methodology

Figures for the numbers of recorded crime incidents presented in this publication are exactly as presented in Recorded Crime Q2 2019.

Notes on how Recorded Crime (RC) Q2 2019 statistics were produced are available at Background Notes.

An incident is considered to be detected when at least one person is linked to the incident as a suspected offender. This is preferable to using the incident_detection_status field for a crime incident, as has been used in the past, because each offender has the method of sanction recorded. The difference between these methods, for crimes recorded in 2018, was less than 0.1% of detected incidents.

For each suspected offender, and in respect of each incident for which they are recorded as a suspected offender, the sanction type (e.g. charge, summons, caution) used is recorded in the offender_detection_status field. This data is used to provide breakdowns of the method of sanction for different crime types.

Incidents are considered to have been charged or summonsed when a valid charge or summons record exists for a valid incident.

Offenders are considered to have been charged or summonsed when the offender_detection_status data field indicates that proceedings have commenced in respect of a specific crime.

Fixed Charge Notices (FCN) and Fixed Penalty Notices (FPN) are extracted from the Fixed Charge Penalty System database. A small number of records are not included in the statistics, such as records whose status is ‘terminated’, records which are assigned to invalid Garda sub-districts (<0.01% of records), and records which exhibited an error once extracted (0.02% of records). It is possible that more than one FCN/FPN may be issued in a single incident, however it is not possible to apply a ‘primary offence’ rule similar to other crimes. For this reason, figures for FCN/FPN reported in this publication reflect the total number issued.

Classifications and definitions

The CSO uses the Irish Crime Classification System (ICCS) to disseminate statistics on Recorded Crime in Ireland. An amended version of the ICCSq is used to classify recorded crime detection rates in Table 3.1. The amended classification groups some offence types together in cases where the recorded values are low. The reason for doing this is to permit further disaggregation while reducing the risk of identification of individuals.

A classification has been introduced to report on Fixed Charge Notices and Fixed Penalty Notices issued by An Garda Síochána. Please contact crime@cso.ie for further information.

Recorded crimes are classified by year and by quarter according to the date_reported data field, as is usual in reporting police-recorded crime statistics in other countries.

The detection rate is the proportion of recorded crimes which have been detected. As such, detection rates reflect the proportion of incidents reported in a year which have since been detected, irrespective of when the detection was recorded. For example, in the case of a crime reported in 2018 for which a summons was issued during 2019, the detection appears in 2018 figures.

The recorded crime rate is the ratio of the number of crimes reported to and recorded by An Garda Síochána relative to the population, expressed as a rate per 100,000 people. Populations for Garda administrative regions are calculated by using measured population by Garda Division from the 2016 Census of Population (for persons in private households) and applying the breakdown to official 2018 national population estimates.

Crimes are classified by location according to the Garda sub-district against which the crime has been recorded. These are aggregated to Garda regions for geographical breakdowns. The Garda regions used in this publication are the ones which were in force in 2018.

The measurement and comparison of urban and rural crime rates has been identified as being of interest to many users. It would be a subjective process to classify every Garda sub-district as being either urban or rural, and one which different users would likely not agree upon. As such the CSO has decided to present figures for Dublin (i.e. Dublin Metropolitan Region) and Outside Dublin (the rest of the country) alongside one another, to allow users to compare such figures if they find such a comparison useful.

Quality Review of detections data – basis for re-publication of detection data

As stated in the main report, PULSE Upgrade 7.3, released on 25 February 2018, introduced new data governance controls in respect of recording detections. These new controls now better ensure that the number of detections identified match the number of sanctions for those detections, apart from what should be a relatively small number of exceptions (e.g. the offender has died). CSO has examined PULSE data in respect of detection data, in order to assess the impact of the changes introduced. CSO looked in particular at reference year 2014 - when caveated statistics were last published by CSO, and reference year 2018 – when the PULSE upgrade was implemented.

There are three main areas of detections data quality improvement:

1. A reduction in the number of suspected offenders classified as having “proceedings commenced” (i.e. the detection status of the suspected offender is recorded as "Proceedings Complete", "Proceedings Commenced" or "Committed for Trial") for which no corresponding charge or summons record could be identified

2. A reduction in the use of the exceptions facility in the designation of a sanction

3. A reduction in the number of suspected offenders for whom no sanction type is recorded in their detection status.

1. With the definition of a “detection” dependent on the application of a designated sanction (charge, caution, etc.), based on An Garda Síochána operational guidelines, a key area of focus relates to any marking of criminal incidents as detected and, in parallel, the marking of persons as suspected offenders, before or in the absence of a formal sanction. For example, persons being recorded as having proceedings commenced against them for a criminal incident even though no matching charge or summons record could be found. The data in Table 9.1 below outlines the scale of this issue for the years 2014 and 2018. Table 9.2 provides a monthly breakdown of the annual figures.  Taken together, these tables outline strong quality improvements in the detections data, with the timing of the PULSE upgrade (25^th February 2018) clearly impacting on the monthly totals from March 2018 onwards.  The 2018 level for this issue (suspected offenders classified as having “proceedings commenced” for which no corresponding charge or summons record could be identified) is only 6% of the 2014 level, with most of this concentrated in the January and February months of 2018.