89 homicides missing in CSO figures due to Garda failings
Watchdog brands revelation ‘shocking’
ALMOST 90 killings are missing from Central Statistics Office figures because of failings in the way homicides have been recorded by Garda members, it emerged yesterday.
Policing Authority member Vicki Conway described the figure as ‘shocking’.
The revelation piles further pressure on Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan – who appeared before the Policing Authority yesterday after it emerged the CSO has suspended the publication of further crime figures until a Garda review into homicide cases is completed.
During the meeting, it came to light that 89 homicides were not recorded properly on the Garda Pulse system.
It comes after Ms O’Sullivan said the top priority in the modernisation programme in An Garda Síochána is cultural renewal. She said this will mean using the good things such as the esprit de corps and can-do attitude, and working on the things that are not so good.
It emerged yesterday that all of the 89 homicides that were not properly counted were cases of dangerous driving causing death, which occurred between 2003 and May of this year. Explaining the background to how the situation arose, the Garda’s civilian head of analysis, Gurchand Singh, said yesterday that there are ‘two sets of broad issues here’.
He said: ‘The first relates to issues that were identified by the CSO... These relate to incidents in what’s called Group One Homicide Offences as a whole.
‘Group One covers murders and manslaughters, but it also covers something called dangerous driving leading to death... I know people think about homicides in the traditional sense of murders and manslaughters, but there’s another group in there; I think that context is important.’
He continued: ‘The other context I think is important too is that the incidents that we are talking about with the CSO, all of them have actually been identified as homicides. So they’re not necessarily classified as anything else. They are actually homicides on our system. But the CSO’s concerns relate to the fact that some important additional pieces of information were either missing or incorrectly applied to the incident.’
Mr Singh said the force looked at just over 1,400 homicide incidents between 2003 to May 2017. He said that one issue was that ‘there were some homicide incidents
‘Wrong incident was being applied’
that did not seem to have an injured party attached to them’.
‘Unfortunately, this arose simply from the fact that the injured party had not been flagged on the incident,’ he said. ‘There is a mechanism on Pulse to say this is the injured party and the injured party is deceased. The flagging process didn’t occur, it’s as simple as that. It was an error.’
Mr Singh was asked if it was a data entry error, and he said that he agreed with that. ‘That’s now actually been rectified,’ he added.
Mr Singh also said that another problem had been identified, in cases where more than one offence had been recorded.
He said that in cases such as this, ‘you have to count the most serious one for statistical purposes’. However, he added: ‘What has unfortunately happened was, while the casing was happening, the wrong incident was being applied – the minor incident was being applied. Which meant that for statistical purposes, we weren’t counting the homicide.’ He added that ‘we’ve fixed that problem’.
Mr Singh also said there ‘is a third issue we have identified’.
‘There were incidents where unfortunately there was multiple homicides... But the way that the incident was cased was only counting one,’ he said. ‘Our crime counting rules are very clear: each one of those victims should have been counted as an individual. We looked at that. Unfortunately, that happened in 26 cases... we rectified the database.’
Mr Singh said that of the 89 homicides incorrectly recorded from 2003 to May of this year, ‘the bulk... came towards the earlier part of this period’. ‘The recording seems to improve towards the later part of it,’ he added.