For citizens, the crime figures that are relevant to their particular community or police station district or even police division region in which they live are important. Citizens need to know what the levels of all crimes that took place and are taking place where they reside. These figures may point to trends where the crime situation may be heading.
Knowledge of crime figures is an integral component of community policing. It empowers citizens with information so that they can then work together with the police and other stakeholders to reduce crime as well as the fear of crime to agreed levels and by mutually agreed-upon strategies. This is practised in developed societies with some success and can indeed work in the Caribbean.
The need for such crime information that concerns citizens is a fundamental requisite for effective decision-making. As businesses and government need information, so too, do citizens. Just as citizens need to know their expected salary, expenses, bank account balances, etc, to plan their lives, they also need to know accurately what are the crime levels in the communities in which they live, work, attend school, shop, etc.
Therefore, efforts should be instituted by relevant authorities to provide such micro-level, community or district-based information on crime to citizens. Today, it is very gratifying that citizens can go to the Police Service's Web site and get crime figures for the country, for specific crimes, by specific months, etc.
There is now need to go one step further providing the crime information by district level. This should also be shared in community or town meetings with citizens. They will begin to understand what crime situation they are facing, make recommendations, assist where possible in implementation, etc. Citizens should not be left out of crime fighting and crime prevention equations.
Citizens must also be encouraged to report crime whether serious or minor, or minor offences. It is only when all crimes are reported that all stakeholders can get a true picture of the crime situation in an area. We know for a fact that not all crimes are reported for various reasons. In criminology, this phenomenon is called "the dark figure of crime." And, it is higher for certain types of crimes than others.
Just as how systems should be put in place to encourage reporting of all crimes, so too systems should be implemented to weed out and discourage false reports. And, this brings to mind a pertinent recommendation. The time is long overdue for the implementation of an oversight body to look into how reports to police end up as an official crime figure. Recently, there have been suggestions that the crime figures may have been tampered with. To avoid this, independent oversight may be a way out of any mess of this sort.
Further, just as there are auditors to ensure and verify that information is accurate in businesses and government ministries and departments for example, so too, this concept and practice should be applied in the compilation of crime figures as this is an essential vein in the life of police organisations and for communities.
In criminology also, there are other ways in which a more accurate picture of the crime situation can be achieved using triangulation. That is, in addition to the police crime figures which have some limitations, two other measures are often used. First, victimisation surveys. With appropriate research design and sampling etc, people are asked to provide information on their experience of being victims of crimes. This has some obvious subjectivity concerns as people may exaggerate or understate information. But, it does give some indication when margins of error, etc, are considered. In fact, the UN has international crime victimisation surveys conducted across scores of countries (of which T&T did not participate in any).
Second, self-report studies are used. People are asked to indicate their own involvement in crime. Again, issues of subjectivity, exaggeration, underreporting, etc, are present here but it can point to some useful trends. As such, the ideal situation is to use information from all three sources to get a truer picture of crime in various communities. Crime statistics alone cannot tell the whole story.
Finally, having accurate crime figures for "minor" crimes/offences (these are less likely to be reported) will also provide excellent opportunities to deal with them before they escalate into more "serious" crimes. They should be nipped in the bud for a safer society.
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