Crime Stoppers data questionable

Citizens would surely have been astonished to hear anyone say that the police have become better at solving crimes. Yet this amazing claim was made by Crime Stoppers chairman Devrol Dupigny when he addressed a Port-of-Spain Rotary Club meeting last Monday. According to Mr Dupigny, the data show that the Police Service’s detection, investigation, and solving of crimes have been improving over the past three years. However, Mr Dupigny gave no breakdown of this data, so we are left to wonder in what areas this improvement has occurred. Clearly, it is not in the detection, investigation and solving of murders. On the contrary, our figures show that murder has increased 300 percent over the past four years, while the arrest rate for that crime has plummeted steadily. Indeed, the detection rate for murders now hovers at around a dismal 20 percent.

The other crime that citizens are mainly concerned about is kidnapping. As with murders, this is an area where the performance of the police has been less than impressive. But kidnapping as an industry is itself just about three years old, so any cases that the police solve would inevitably reflect an improvement. We hope, however, that Mr Dupigny was not misled by any such statistical sleight-of-hand. This leaves us with the other common categories of crime — assault, rape, robbery, burglary, and drug use. Is it in these areas that the police have been improving? It is true that figures can be found which show a drop in several of these crimes.

However, it is also true that the results of a survey by criminologist Professor Ramesh Deosaran found that the reporting of crimes to the police has also declined. So the question is this — has the performance of the police really increased, or have citizens so lost faith in the police that they do not even bother to report crimes? To be quite blunt, the latter explanation seems more likely. This is why, in the aftermath of last Saturday’s bomb explosion, the call by Acting Police Commissioner Glen Roach for citizens to cooperate with the police has been greeted with a certain derision. Citizens frequently complain about the bad manners, offhand attitude, and plain incompetence of the officers who are on duty in the stations. It can take hours just to make a report.

Officers often seem to view the person making the complaint as a nuisance or even a criminal. And when reports are phoned in, officers too often take far too long to reach the scene — if they come at all. All these factors mitigate against citizens cooperating with the police. Yet there may be another explanation for Mr Dupigny’s surprising data. We have noticed that police officers have lately been a lot more active in stopping and checking motorists and in raiding places which cater to “immoral activities”. Given a sufficient number of such cases, we suppose the figures may well show that the police are detecting, investigating, and solving more crimes. However, it is only when that energy is turned towards murders and kidnappings that Mr Dupigny’s data will give real reassurance to citizens.