It is worth noting that the statistics take no account of recent population increases. Between the two census periods of 1996 and 2002, the population rose by 300,000 or 8%. We can factor in the effect of population change on crime statistics by using the measure of the crime rate as opposed to the crime level. The former is the number of crimes recorded per 1,000 of the population. On this basis, the crime rate in 2002 was 27.02 per 1,000 of population which compares with 27.79 per 1,000 of population in 1996. Unfortunately, a similar analysis cannot be conducted by geographical area because the Garda regions and divisions do not correspond to civil administrative areas used in collecting data for the census.