The annual hype fest has taken place in the last few weeks with the publication of the annual crime statistics. The hilarity was heightened by the fortuitous coincidental publication of the drugs prevalence report. The professional crime hype-merchants (aka crime correspondents) had lots to hype about.
But, but... alarmingly few people are hooked on drugs. While almost a quarter of the population (between the ages 15 and 64) have taken illegal drugs in their lifetime, less than a third of these took illegal drugs in the last year and less than 3 per cent in the last month. And one of the significances of this is that the vast majority of people who have taken illegal drugs are not hooked on these drugs - if they were then far more than 3 per cent would have taken these drugs in the last month.
Nearly 22 per cent have taken cannabis in their lifetime but only 2.6 per cent in the last month (is cannabis addictive?). For heroin less than half of one per cent took heroin ever and the number who took heroin in the last month is too small to be recorded. Cocaine, including crack, you would have thought would be a good deal more promising, especially given all the hype, most especially on the national crime station, RTÉ. Disappointingly, only 5.3 per cent ever took cocaine and half of one per cent in the last month. Again the vast majority of those who have taken cocaine have not had an ongoing problem with it, otherwise they would be still taking it.
Yes, these drugs do cause problems for some people - notably for people in the socially vulnerable (ie deprived) categories. But talk about epidemics and crises is just nonsense.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has taken over responsibility for publishing the crime statistics and last April it published a health warning about these statistics (Interpreting Crime Statistics), which points out the fallibility of these statistics and the dangers of comparisons. Not a hint of these reservations were alluded to in the recent coverage of the crime statistics for 2007.
The first point to be made about the crime statistics is that the level of "headline" crime has remained in the bracket of 76,000-110,000 for more than 20 years now (that is if one is disposed to pay attention to "headline" statistics). This is despite our having had a growing population during this time which means that the number of crimes per head of population has declined significantly. Did anybody other than Brian Lenihan allude to this obvious phenomenon?
The next point to be made is that the vast preponderance of criminality in the statistics relates to thefts and burglaries. Almost 80 per cent of all the headline crime relates to theft and robbery (82,250 thefts and robberies in 2007 out of a total "headline" crime figure of 104,946 - ie 78 per cent). I am not saying these are insignificant crimes but are they what we might call "headline"? Drunk driving for instance does not make it into "headline" crime. Nor, as far as I can see, corporate fraud, even a single fraud of €80 million!
So what is going on here? How does the theft of €200 get into the headline crime figures but the theft of €80 million does not? Then there is the incidence of drug crimes - 2,269 in 2007. This figure is entirely meaningless for it relates only to the number of drug offences detected by the Garda.
Probably in the region of a million drug crimes were committed in the year - 7.2 per cent of the population consumed illicit drugs last year, about quarter of a million people, and you can bet these, on average, committed at least four drug crimes each. So when the crime statistics report an increase, say, of 100 per cent in drug crime - alarm, alarm - it might well mean merely that the Garda was more lucky in the year in question in detecting drug crime than in the previous year.
Then there are sex crimes. The CSO reports just 1,196 sex crimes in 2007. This has the same credibility as drug crimes. It represents a tiny fraction of the actual incidence of sex crime. And when the incidence of reported sex crime increases it might be a welcome development for it could mean that more people were reporting sex crime.
You would have thought that the statistics on murder would be reliable. But, for the first time, there is reason to wonder. The number of murders recorded by the CSO is 78 for 2007 but the Garda told the media about only 58 murders during the course of 2007, so where did the extra 20 murders come from? I asked the CSO about this and they said to ask the Garda. I asked the Garda and it said it may have arisen from a reinterpretation of incidents. A garda cited the case of Tommy Thompson in Laois. This was assumed to be a missing person case but has been reclassified as murder. But 20 of these? When we misrepresent and misunderstand the crime and drug phenomena we take wrong decisions and adopt wrong remedies that damage people and society.