Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 10 October 2018
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality
Community Policing and Rural Crime: Discussion (Resumed)
9:00 am
Mr. Michael Finn:
I might share some of the knowledge here. I have to claim responsibility for some of it due to some work I was doing on improving the quality of our data across the organisation. One of the initiatives we brought in was in respect of how we claim detections. When somebody was apprehended in the past, we would have claimed detection earlier on. Now we have changed it in the interests of improving our data, so that it is not until someone is summonsed to court that the detection is claimed. This year, our detections dropped because of that lag. It is only when the cases come to court now that a detection will be claimed. That has impacted on our detection statistics for the first half of this year. It will probably be March of next year, when we will have had 12 months of the new statistics, that we will see it beginning to level out and come back to normal. Right now, there is a dip in the detection rate caused by that anomaly for which I have to take some responsibility. Yesterday, I met officials from the Central Statistics Office and they are quite happy. The office knows what we are doing and why. It is all part of our initiative to improve the quality of data.
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