New Irish crime stats reveal sex offences, assaults and drug offences all up

The Central Statistics Office today published crime statistics for the 12 months leading up to June 2019.

In the data, offences are grouped in 15 categories. There has been a 9.2% increase in reported sexual offences, with a total of 3,286 logged by the Gardaí - almost 10 per day. It is a record high for Ireland. Attempts and threats to murder, assaults, harassments and related offences have also increased by over 6%, with 20,656 such crimes recorded. The biggest observed increase has come in fraud, deception and related offences, which have shot up by 34%. 7,265 fraud offences were recorded this year. Drug offences have also gone up by 16.5%. Elsewhere, homicide and related offences have plummeted by 40.4%, almost having from 2017-2018. Burglary is also down by just under 10%, though there were still as many as 16,617 such crimes recorded in the past 12 months. A full break down of crimes by category can be seen below. These statistics have been categories by the CSO as "Under Reservation" — a designation which indicates that "the quality of these statistics do not meet the standards required of official statistics published by the CSO."

By way of explanation, the CSO have clafiried: "PULSE data is now subject to a number of separate ongoing quality reviews and does not currently meet the CSO’s standards for completeness and accuracy. The timeline for the completion of these reviews has been extended on a number of occasions and at present there is no firm completion date.

"The CSO is mandated to produce statistical outputs relating to economic, social and general activities, and conditions in the State. Crime statistics form a key part of such information."

The CSO expects the above statistics to be revised in future, with specific reference to homicide figures. They note: "There is an ongoing review by An Garda Síochána into the recording of homicide incidents. This review covers the period 2003 – 2017. It is likely that this review will result in changes to the classification of some incidents."

"Data quality issues raised by the CSO in relation to the recording of homicide incidents may also result in further revisions of homicide data.

"Robust, trustworthy crime statistics are a vital tool for decision makers and of significant public interest and the CSO remains committed to advising and assisting AGS in improving the quality of its data."