The Auditor-General released a report into Victorian crime statistics on Wednesday. Photo: Getty
Victoria’s crime statistics have not been manipulated and can be
trusted, an audit says, as a perception of lawlessness takes hold of the
state.
The Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) has found crime is on the decline, with offences
dropping 7.4 per cent in the year to March.
The
opposition has rejected optimistic readings of the data to wedge the
Labor government on law and order before the November election.
But the Auditor-General on Wednesday said the data was reliable, after reviewing Victoria Police and CSA methods.
“We
did not detect any manipulation of crime data or cases falsely recorded
as resolved,” the report said of Victoria Police records.
It
comes after the former police chief commissioner fudged the assault
rate before the 2010 election, the state Ombudsman previously found.
Some risks still remain, the audit said.
There
is a risk that police could artificially clear cases to improve rates
with high-volume crimes like theft. The audit found no evidence of it in
the cases reviewed.
“Another risk is that a serious offence, such
as aggravated burglary, is not recorded accurately and downgraded to
the less serious offence of theft,” the report said.
“Such inaccuracies could mislead the community about crimes and provide a false picture of police success in addressing crime.”
The audit “found no patterns in the data that would indicate intentional downgrading” by police.
CSA’s
methodology for using that police data was found to be transparent and
reliable. It does not audit police data and does not have the power to
improve its quality.
The agency’s chief statistician, Fiona Dowsley, welcomed the findings.
Monash University criminologist Rebecca Wickes told
The New Daily that CSA data was reliable in her experience, and that more complex data breakdown required more resources.
The report also found Victoria Police has done little to help its officers understand prima facie since 2013.
Because
of its non-compliance with that reporting, the Australian Bureau of
Statistics does not report the number of assaults in Victoria.
The report said officers sometimes investigate before deciding whether to record the incident as a crime.
Victoria
Police accepted the nine recommendations, including training officers
to report incidents prima facie, if an incident appears to be a crime on
first look rather than waiting until further investigation.
CSA
is often cited for listing people born in Sudan as accounting for 1 per
cent of offenders in Victoria. They make up 0.1 per cent of the
population, according to the latest Census data.
Prof Wickes said the Sudanese-born population was much younger than the general population.
She said it was a “brute fact” that people aged 15-24 were those most likely to commit crimes in any demographic.
The context
The Auditor-General
report
comes days after police botched its response to a brawl in Collingwood,
where a record label launch at the Gasometer Hotel went sour.
Police
wrongly said an 18-year-old man had his leg amputated after being
crushed by a car in the affray. His leg was not amputated.
The suspected driver was arrested and released without charge.
There were claims authorities were warned it could turn violent, but failed to properly prepare and manage it.
A resident, who did not want to be named, told
The New Daily on Sunday she went onto the street to ask police “why they weren’t doing anything”.
Legal observers from Melbourne Activist Legal said reporting was overblown.
Investigations are continuing.
Victoria
Police on Wednesday announced new crowd control weapons to be used from
later this week, but rejected suggestions the timing was linked to the
Collingwood brawl.
Weapons include pepper-ball firearms, 40mm firearms, hand and sound/flash devices.
Dye
could be used in the non-lethal weapons to “hit certain offenders that
we need to identify or arrest”, Assistant Commissioner Chris O’Neill
told reporters.
“This is not specific to the Collingwood event,
but in events where we want to disperse crowds, where we want to mark
people, where we want to go and make arrests, all this sort of equipment
are options that we could use.”
The assistant commissioner cited
the December clash between protesters and controversial British
commentator Milo Yiannopoulos as an example.
Source: thenewdaily.com.au
