Analysis: Garda resources a key factor in battling crime

As a dispute emerged yesterday between the Garda Representative Association and Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan about how crimes are recorded and whether the crime rates are being “massaged”, the release of a major new report on detection rates was a timely intervention.

It serves to show very clearly that, irrespective of the finer details around how crimes are recorded now in comparison to recent years, a very significant number of criminals are not being caught – or at least not being caught for many of the offences they commit.

Since the economy peaked in the 2007-2008 period, the vast majority of crime categories have witnessed a reduction in offences recorded. The exception to that rule almost every time the Central Statistics Office has released its official crime rate data has been burglaries.

Figures for crime detections over the five-year period to the end of 2011 released by the CSO yesterday reveal fewer than one in four burglaries committed in that period have been solved.

The detection rates for other crimes such as robbery, fraud and extortion show gardaí solve about half, while in murder and manslaughter cases, more than four out of five are detected.

Those areas where detection rates are very low strongly suggest that if Garda resources are continually decreased, we may find ourselves living in a State where the solving of some crimes becomes an exceptional policing outcome rather than the norm people expect.

The level of funding available to the Garda in recent years has, like in all parts of the public sector, fallen significantly. Numbers in the force are being depleted and a recent promise by Minister for Justice Alan Shatter to begin Garda recruitment again in the near future to keep numbers above 13,000 has already been shelved.

With fewer gardaí working fewer hours, it is not unreasonable to suggest that at least some of the decrease in the crime rates since the boom ended are not real; they arise because fewer people are being caught committing crime rather than the actual incidence of such crime falling by the levels the figures suggest.