The Central Statistics Office has started publishing crime statistics again this week. Despite the CSO is presenting this as a new problem the issues around the accuracy of crime statistics are as old as the notion of crime statistics themselves and not really resolvable. The current focus of attention in Ireland has been on the period from 2003 onwards but the problem of unreliability of crime statistics has a longer but largely unacknowledged history. The quality of crime statistics in England and Wales has, for example, been an ongoing issue for the UK Statistics Authority. The overall implications of these considerations are that it is not just current crime figures that must be treated with “reservations”, crime statistics should always be treated in this way.

Source: The Irish Times March 28, 2018 14:26 UTC