The justice department cannot be trusted , they lie and cover up the truth about everything

 Crime stats from AGS can never be trusted

They lie and cover up the truth

And destroy whistleblowers who expose the truth

gardacorruption

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/cso-seeking-clarification-on-integrity-of-garda-data/40610796.html

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is awaiting “clarification” from An Garda Síochána amid concerns it will suspend publication of crime statistics for a third time since 2014 over the integrity of Garda data.

Less than a fortnight ago, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris publicly apologised to victims of domestic violence whose emergency calls were not properly responded to.

An internal inquiry is under way into how thousands of 999 calls were cancelled by gardaí across the country over a 22-month period.

The investigation, led by Assistant Commissioner Barry O’Brien, has found 3,120 calls reporting domestic violence were not followed up on by gardaí. So far the inquiry has established more than half of these were either cancelled correctly, in instances where there were duplicate incidents, or were cancelled without impacting on a victim.

When contacted by the Sunday Independent, the CSO confirmed it is awaiting more information from the garda. It also pointed out the CSO previously felt compelled, in 2014 and again in 2017, to suspend the publication of recorded crime statistics over data concerns.

“As yet, we do not have clarification from An Garda Síochána on the full impact of the issue, and when we receive this we can assess the impact on recorded crime statistics,” it said.

“The CSO is currently finalising its latest assessment of the quality of Pulse data for statistical purposes, which is due to be published on 23 July, 2021. This report will reference the reporting-recording gap that the cancelled 999 calls issue highlights.

“As more information on the cancelled 999 calls issue becomes available to the CSO, we will keep our users updated.”

At present, the CSO publishes crime statistics “under reservation”, because of previous data issues.

The statement continued: “The CSO first suspended the publication of recorded crime statistics in 2014 following a Garda Inspectorate report identifying quality issues in relation to the recording of data on the Pulse system.

“In the wake of further issues with Pulse data in relation to homicide incidents, the CSO took a decision in early 2017 to suspend all publication of Recorded Crime statistics.”

The Policing Authority previously expressed its “deep dissatisfaction” with how it was informed of the issue. There was concern that the extent of domestic violence incidents involved in cancelled calls was not brought to the Authority’s attention until April, even though the issue was first discovered six months earlier.

The garda review has found that 202,931 emergency calls (14pc of all calls) were cancelled between January 2019 and October 2020.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-40343861.html

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has called on An Garda Síochána to carry out a “full end-to-end review” of how crimes are recorded on its Pulse system in the wake of recent concerns over emergency 999 calls being inappropriately cancelled.

On Friday, the national statistics agency published its fourth review assessing the quality of Garda crime statistics and found that, while improvements have been made, the data should remain ‘under reservation’ for now.

The Garda crime figures are the only CSO statistics to carry this caveat, which has been in place since March 2018.

Concerns around the quality of the crime figures first emerged following a review by the Garda Inspectorate in 2014.

The latest CSO review did not assess emergency 999 calls as an internal Garda investigation is ongoing.

The CSO said it is awaiting clarification of the "full extent" of the issue from Gardaí but said it "may further impact" existing quality concerns.

Crimes reported by members of the public to Gardaí by phone, including via emergency 999 calls, are recorded on the Garda Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system.

“The premature or improper cancellation of calls on the CAD system means that records relating to these crimes may not have been created on PULSE and are therefore not counted in Recorded Crime statistics,” CSO Statistician Sam Scriven said.

“It is critical that An Garda Síochána ensure they have appropriate internal controls to mitigate against crime recording procedures not being followed. The CSO recommends that An Garda Síochána carry out a full end-to-end review of the crime incident reporting and recording process, with a particular focus on the necessary internal controls to better ensure good quality reported crime data,” he added.

Mr Scriven said the police force itself was not assessing the quality of the crime data recorded on the Pulse system and this needed to change: “There is a need for An Garda Síochána to monitor and evaluate data quality, and, ultimately, to report on data quality in a transparent way to users."

The ‘reservation’ caveat on the crime figures could only be lifted, he said, if “confidence” is built through a “trusted and transparent data quality verification process” by Gardaí.

As part of the latest review, the CSO checked the quality of a sample of crimes and other incidents recorded on the Pulse system in 2020 and found “clear evidence” of improvement since 2018.

Of a sample of 200 non-crime incidents - complaints, lost property reports, or domestic disputes where no offence occurred – assessed by the CSO, just one or less than 1% was misclassified - this compares to 98% in 2017, 97% in 2015 and 92% in 2011.

Of a sample of 100 crimes marked ‘invalid’ on Pulse last year, 92% had the reason for invalidation recorded – this compared to 88% in 2017, 79% in 2015 and 77% in 2011.

The CSO, however, also highlighted issues with how ‘linked’ crime cases were recorded as there were several examples of them being recorded as a single crime where they should have been recorded as multiple separate crimes.

One quarter of 100 sample crimes recorded as linked or connected cases in 2020 did not comply with counting rules, the review found.

In one example, 10 incidents of historic sexual assault involving 10 different victims and reported on different dates were linked on the Pulse system as a single ‘primary’ incident but should be recorded as 10 separate incidents, the CSO said.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/cso-highlights-continuing-problems-with-garda-crime-statistics-1.4628775

Crime statistic recording still a problem in An Garda Síochána - CSO

https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2019/0411/1042093-garda-crime-statistic-recording-still-a-problem-cso/

The Director General of the Central Statistics Office has told the Public Accounts Committee that there are still issues with the recording of crime statistics in the Garda Síochána. 

Pádraig Dalton told the committee today that while there had been improvements in how data is recorded on Pulse, the CSO publishes the statistics "under reservation". 

In 2017, the CSO suspended the publication of any further crime figures for a second time until a garda review into homicide cases was completed. The review began after it was suspected that a number of cases of murder, manslaughter and violent deaths may have been mis-classified.

"There are still issues with the statistics that we are compiling from the Pulse system and that means that there are problems with the data that reside within the Pulse system and that is why the statistics are published under reservation," Mr Dalton told the Committee. 

Mr Dalton explained that classifying the statistics as "under reservation" meant there were concerns around the source. He said the only sources of crime statistics was based on the Pulse system. 

He said the CSO was working continuously with the force to improve data recording and to ensure that the crime recording rules are followed. 

Among the problems identified with the data included the difference between the number of crimes reported and subsequently recorded in the system; the recording of the completeness of the crime; and the timeliness of the recording. 

Assistant Director of the CSO Richard McMahon said there had been improvements following the CSO's quality reviews and that the Pulse system is being adapted by the force to address the issues raised. 

"It's important to note there have been improvements, but still significant gaps exist," Mr McMahon said.

Mr Dalton told members it was important the force appoints a single person at a very senior level to oversee data recording. 

The committee was told that there are similar difficulties in other jurisdictions in the recording of crime statistics because forces are working with systems designed for administration rather that statistical purposes. 

Crime statistics in the UK were downgraded from official statistics to unofficial statistics arising from quality concerns around the data. 

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/cso-may-delay-crime-figures-over-concerns-on-garda-data-1.2004644

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/cso-postpones-publishing-garda-crime-data-again-1.3213448

Blow to gardaí as CSO delays stats

An Garda Síochána’s credibility has suffered another blow after the CSO decided for a second time not to publish Garda crime statistics.

The decision was made after Garda bosses told the CSO they had ongoing doubts over the quality of their homicide data — and wanted to carry out a “deeper” examination.

It comes as Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan was expected back in Ireland after attending a conference in Europe, amid ongoing calls for her to step down over the breath test and penalty point reports.

Skills Minister John Halligan said “confidence is eroding” in gardaí, but Taoiseach Leo Varadkar avoided answering questions on the commissioner’s future at two events yesterday.

The CSO initially suspended publication of Garda crime figures last June after it identified quality concerns regarding Garda homicide figures specifically.

Last April, Ms O’Sullivan told the Policing Authority the force was conducting a review based on classification issues regarding 41 homicides recorded between 2013 and 2015.

This review expanded in June when the commissioner told the authority a further 89 homicides between 2003 and 2017 had not been reported to the CSO because they had been recorded incorrectly on the Garda Pulse system.

The CSO had planned to publish two sets of quarterly crime figures on September 20 but was informed by gardaí that they wanted to conduct further work on the homicide data.

In a statement, the CSO said: “Following discussions with An Garda Síochána, the Central Statistics Office has further deferred the publication of Recorded Crime statistics.

“This follows on from An Garda Síochána’s recent decision to extend their review of homicide data.”

Olive Loughnane of the CSO Crime Section told the Irish Examiner the gardaí had said they should be able to be in a position to give a timeframe for delivery of the data next week.

However, she said she did not expect the data “anytime soon”.

She said the gardaí had supplied the CSO with data for publication, but said they wanted to carry out further work on homicide figures.

“This is their data set,” said Ms Loughnane.

“They were telling us they needed to extend and do more work. They said ‘look, there’s something here we want to look at at a deeper level’ and, because of that, we took the decision that we will wait.”

At the public meeting with the Policing Authority last June, Ms O’Sullivan said an in-depth review was taking place on homicide statistics and to ensure that there were no consequences in the investigations concerned.

Authority chair Josephine Feehily expressed concern at the impact on “community confidence and potentially on victims”, while then authority member, Vicky Conway, described the revelations as “alarming”.

Ms Feehily noted that they still had not received a report on 41 homicide cases, revealed to the authority last April.

In a statement at the end of July, the authority said the absence of a timeline for a completed report on homicide data was “increasingly difficult to understand”.

Mr Halligan, said: “I think the Irish public deserve an explanation as to what has happened over the last number of years. The confidence in the gardaí, there’s no question about it, it is eroding, and I think we need to steady it.

“There are a number of commissions at present taking place and when they review what has happened we’ll see where we go from there.”

The Independent Alliance TD made the comment at an event attended by Mr Varadkar and Tánaiste and Enterprise Minister Frances Fitzgerald, a former justice minister, both of whom declined to take questions.

Mr Varadkar did not respond to a question on the commissioner’s future at a later press launch at Government Buildings.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20458578.html

https://gript.ie/garda-says-an-garda-siochana-does-not-care-about-road-safety/

GARDA SAYS “AN GARDA SÍOCHÁNA DOES NOT CARE ABOUT ROAD SAFETY,”

A member of the Garda Divisional Roads Policing Unit has said that some Gardaí are ‘blowing into breathalyzers themselves’ in order to give the appearance of doing drink driving checks.

In a letter seen by Gript, the Garda says that there is a culture of doing ‘as little as possible’ within the unit and that being a “productive member” led them to experience “intimidation” from higher ups as their work ethic was ‘making others look bad’. 

The letter, which was sent to the offices of the Deputy Garda Commissioner,  also claims that members of the Traffic Corps routinely avoid giving speeding tickets, fines for unaccompanied drivers or those with no tax/insurance, and even fail to pursue vehicles which set off ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) alarms.  

“Criminals are using the roads everyday and there is almost nobody to stop them,” it says. 

“It is very well known in An Garda Síochána that Roads Policing is where people go to retire or to get away from the ‘regular’, to get away from doing work,” 

It is also claimed that drink driving checkpoints were put on only on paper to be recorded by the PULSE system but that in some instances there was no physical Garda presence maintained. 

“Nobody spoke out about it while it was happening, we were told to just put them on, management could have easily checked but nobody cared as long as it looked good on the returns given to the media or the RSA,”

The member of An Garda Síochána says that a culture of “keeping quiet” -which they say is widespread among the force – led them to ‘hate themselves’. 

It is also claimed that many members of An Garda Síochána, while well intentioned, “fall into line” as this is easier than “suffering the punishment” for speaking out within the force. 

The Garda says that while they do not wish to expose their identity and become a whistle blower that they might “resign in disgust at what I have become,” 

They say this became all the more clear to them after they encountered a lady who had lost her child in a road traffic accident and received her praise for their ‘hard work’. . 

“I felt terrible if only she knew how little An Garda Síochána cares about road safety and the memory of her child,” it says. 

The letter says that there is ample evidence to support the claims but that as yet this does not appear to have been picked up on by Senior Garda Management, the RSA, or the Policing Authority, 

An Garda Síochána told Gript they are “making enquiries” into the matter and “hope to revert with a response in due course”. 

Garda crime figures are a disgrace - how can anyone miss 234 deaths?

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/pat-flanagan-column-garda-crime-12275655

We were being told Ireland is a low-crime country - when all along at the back of our mind we knew it was rampant

The disclosure that gardai somehow missed 234 homicides and classified them as lesser crimes should shock, but it won’t.

So should the fact senior civil servants earning as much as government ministers don’t know how to search their emails, especially damning ones relating to Sgt Maurice McCabe.

And there we were being told Ireland is a low-crime country when all along at the back of our mind we knew it was rampant.

For years you’ve been saying that this is a crime-ridden country where people, especially women, aren’t safe in their homes, never mind the street.

How many times have distraught parents rang up Joe Duffy to relay some horror story of how their son was beaten to a pulp on the street in an unprovoked attack?

But we’d be reassured by the Government stats which show violent crime is relatively rare and the official figures don’t lie.

Now we know the truth. To put it bluntly – the crime figures going back as far as 2003 have been a load of bollocks.

Imagine missing 234 homicides. Think of all those bodies, the lines of coffins and no one noticed.

That’s 234 funerals with grieving families and they never existed according to the gardai’s PULSE computer system. Indeed they would still not exist if not for garda civilian analysts Lois West and Laura Galligan, the two brave women who highlighted this madness.

It must be extremely frustrating for the ordinary gardai out there doing their best and getting dogs’ abuse for doing it.

They must be asking themselves how it came to a situation where the force is being accused of everything from money laundering and smearing whistleblowers as child sex offenders to doctoring the crime figures.

Homicides in Ireland higher than recorded as gardai classify figures wrongly, CSO figures confirm

It has emerged that 234 incidents should have been recorded as homicides but were not

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/homicides-ireland-higher-recorded-gardai-12268463

Justice doesn’t know how many unsolved homicides there’ve been since 1995

https://extra.ie/2024/03/11/news/irish-news/justice-homicides-unsolved

The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, has admitted that neither she nor the Gardaí can provide figures for how many unsolved homicides there have been in Ireland since 1995.

Ms McEntee is also unable to provide figures for unsolved murders of women in the same period – making both these revelations in response to questions from independent TD Carol Nolan.

In the wake of high-profile murders such as that of teacher Ashling Murphy in Tullamore in 2022, Ms McEntee promised a zero-tolerance approach to fatal violence against women.

Ms Nolan first posed the question on January 18 when she asked the minister in writing about the number of unsolved homicides in Ireland from 1995 to date along with the breakdown, by gender, of the victims for each year.

In her initial response, Ms McEntee said: ‘Unfortunately, the information was not received in time. I will contact the deputy directly once it is to hand.’

However, six weeks later, in a letter on February 28, the minister was forced to concede that the information had never been collated within the Garda or the Department of Justice.

She wrote: ‘As you will appreciate the manner in which all Garda investigations are conducted – including unsolved murders – and how resources are deployed are matters for the Garda Commissioner and his management team. Garda authorities advise me that the work of the Homicide Investigation Review Team remains ongoing.’

‘I am further advised that the information requested is not readily available and would require a disproportionate amount of Garda time and resources to compile.’

And despite her pledges for renewed focus on the issue of femicide, she admitted: ‘I also understand that there is no gender analysis available for undetected homicides specifically.’

She added: ‘As you may also be aware, 2016-2022 statistics regarding victims of homicide and other offences, including the sex of the victim, are available from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).’

In response, Ms Nolan said, ‘It is a matter of deep surprise and indeed disappointment to me that data on the number of unresolved homicides is not readily available.’

‘This is particularly the case given the significant emphasis in recent years on the issue of violence against women.’

‘In fact, I would go further and characterise the information deficit as acutely embarrassing for a modern police force. This points towards a level of disarray that will do nothing to inspire confidence in how crimes of this magnitude are collated.’

‘We are not talking here about data hidden away in archives from the era of the foundation of the State, but about murders that took place in recent decades.’

‘I would have thought such information would have been readily available.’

The quality of Garda statistics has been a matter of concern for over a decade, with the CSO suspending the publication of Recorded Crime statistics in 2014.

The CSO said it did so following a Garda Inspectorate report identifying ‘quality issues in relation to the recording of data on the Pulse system’.

The Pulse system is the only source of recorded crime data available to the CSO to produce these statistics.

In 2015, the CSO published a Review of the Quality of Crime Statistics. At that time, it recommenced publishing recorded crime statistics but included caveats in relation to the quality of the underlying data.

However, after further quality issues emerged with regard to Pulse data, the CSO decided in early 2017 to postpone further publication.

The CSO said it made this decision ‘pending the completion of an internal review of 41 homicide incidents by An Garda Síochána and the investigation of concerns raised separately by the CSO in respect of Pulse homicide records.’

In September 2017, the CSO further deferred the publication of Recorded Crime statistics.

Meanwhile, the Journal website this weekend said that a ‘pandemic of gender-based violence’ continues unabated, according to a new cross-European investigation.

Thousands of women are murdered every year across the 28 European countries examined, with over 14,000 women the victims of intentional homicide from 2012 to 2022.

During that time, almost 100 women were murdered in Ireland, according to the Garda figures released by the CSO.

Last year, nine more women were murdered, according to the Women’s Aid Ireland Femicide Watch, meaning in total over 100 women have lost their lives in a violent crime since 2012.

However, the Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence report published by the CSO reveals that ‘homicide offences including murder, manslaughter and dangerous driving causing death had been trending downwards, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and 2021 had the lowest number of incidents recorded since 2013.’