The fact gardai recorded carrying out one million checks for drink driving that were never carried out at all is simply staggering.
And now that the crisis has come to light, nobody in the Garda seems to be able – or is willing – to explain what on earth is going on.
What we do know is that in the period from 2012 to 2016 records were created on the Garda’s computer database PULSE suggesting 1,995,369 breath tests were carried out.
It now emerges the true figure was 1,058,157.
At a media briefing yesterday where the full scale of the debacle was revealed, senior officers said a further investigation was underway, headed by a superintendent. But senior management said it was not certain whether the report from that investigation would be published.
Those familiar with breath testing procedures told The Irish Times that when a driver was tested and passed there was no need to create a detailed record for each of those tests.
“If there are a lot of tests that didn’t throw up a [positive] result, the record keeping can be lax,” said one source. “A dozen passed tests could become 20 when a record of the checkpoint is being entered on PULSE a week later.”
The same source said it would be impossible to prove whether the inflating of test numbers was intentional on the part of the Garda member involved or whether that garda “genuinely thought he had done more tests than he actually had”.
One could see how, in theory, there may be an innocent explanation for at least some of the over-recording. But the creation of a statistical databank over five years inflating tests by a staggering 100 per cent simply cannot be explained by innocent mistakes.
The Policing Authority is clearly troubled.
Serious questions
“This is not just an academic statistical matter, it is an ethical one,” it said.
"It raises serious questions of integrity for the Garda Síochána organisation and combined with previous issues regarding inflated activity levels, erodes confidence in the credibility of Garda data generally."
The trouble is that we’ve been here before. Repeatedly and very recently. And every time the figures for all sorts of Garda activity are proven wrong, the “mistakes” have always benefitted the Garda at the time they were being made.
Crime rates were underestimated and Garda’s detection rates overestimated; not the other way around.
The Garda Inspectorate previously found an under-recording of offences of around 38 per cent.
And while the Garda claimed an average detection rate of 43 per cent, the real figure was 26 per cent, the inspectorate said.
When the practice of reclassifying crimes – as more serious or less serious than initially believed –- was examined once again the “mistakes” suited the Garda.
For example, more than 80 per cent of reclassifications were done to reduce the seriousness of the offence and 71 per cent of those were found to be unjustified.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) in 2014 became so concerned at the accuracy of the crime figures being supplied to it by the Garda that it suspended the publication of crime statistics.
The CSO at the time found 18 per cent of crimes reported by the public to the Garda were not recorded in official statistics.
Theft and related offences were out by 27 per cent, sexual crimes counted wrongly by a margin of 5 per cent and burglaries recorded wrongly by a margin of 18 per cent. In all of these cases the crime problem had been underestimated.
The only crime categories, out of 14, that were found to be accurate were homicides and “kidnapping and related offences”. It is hard to deny a dead body or a kidnap offence with a victim and possibly witnesses.
