SHIFT IN NATURE OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

If your postman were suddenly to announce that next week he would
concentrate on providing daily deliveries of letters on one side of the
road, this initiative to be designated Operation Sunny Side of the Street,
he would be met with puzzled responses from the public. But when the Garda
announces it will henceforth enforce the law in respect of seatbelts,
roadworthiness of vehicles and speeding, we accept this in a
straightforward, non-committal manner.

In advance of the recent August bank holiday, the Garda Traffic Policy Unit
announced Operation Belt Up, to address seatbelt infringements; Operation
Check Up, to focus on tyres, lights and brakes; and Operation Juggernaut
and Operation Fare to concentrate respectively on heavy goods vehicles and
buses, taxis and coaches. Would it not have been simpler to announce that
members of the force would be on duty, and enforcing the law, over the
weekend?

The reason the Garda now makes such a song and dance about doing what
everyone thought was being done all along is that we live in the era of
public relations policing, the point of which is not just to do the job,
but to be seen to be doing the job. The same principle applies to the
recent publicity about the annual crime statistics, the point of which
appears to have been to present the authorities in a pleasing light.

The main focus was on the fact that crime figures were down by about 8 per
cent in the first six months of 1999, compared to 1998, which in turn
showed an improvement on 1997.

The Minister for Justice, Mr John O'Donoghue, claimed this as a vindication
of his policies and of the performance of the Garda, which he said had been
"spectacularly successful" in reducing crime. There followed the usual
ideologically-inspired fracas, in which various interests sought to explain
the crime figures in ways convenient to their own beliefs. Mostly these
arguments centred on the nature of punishment rather than on the pattern of
criminality.

Those who opposed Mr O'Donoghue's "zero tolerance" initiative naturally
asserted that the improved statistics had nothing to do with such measures,
and various alternative theories were advanced, including the success of
community-based anti-drugs initiatives and the expansion of methadone
treatment programmes. There appeared to be a consensus among such experts
that increasing employment was causing criminals or would-be criminals to
move into the legitimate economy.

Diverting as it may be to contemplate the prospect of former handbag
snatchers operating as stock-jobbers in the Dublin Financial Services
Centre, we need to present ourselves for a reality check if we are
beginning to believe that increasing prosperity brings a decline in
criminality.

And if you factor in the drug-related nature of much modern crime, you may
decide that, contrary to the current mood of self-congratulation, our
patterns of criminality give even more cause for concern than previously.

As I've observed before, fluctuations in the level of petty crime are
intimately bound up with the availability and price of hard drugs on the
street. Crime figures reached an all-time high here in the mid-1990s,
coinciding with inflated street prices for heroin and other hard drugs.

Since then, prices have fallen significantly as the supply increased in
spite of the best efforts of the authorities. Cheap, plentiful drugs mean
less burglaries and handbag snatches, for the simple reason that a fix
costs less. One of the strange ironies of a drug-saturated crime culture is
that reduced levels of burglary and larceny, far from occasioning
complacency, should be alerting the authorities to the fact they are losing
the battle with the drug dealers.

There are other interesting aspects to the figures which have been reported
but not explained. Firstly, while there has been a marginal fall-off in
burglaries and larcenies, more serious categories of crime have shown
significant increases. Armed robbery, for example, is up 110 per cent.
Secondly, there is a somewhat erratic regional pattern to the alleged
success by the Garda in fighting crime. Even John O'Donoghue was moved to
wonder aloud why, with overall figures on the decline, was crime increasing
in his Kerry backyard.

In general, crime appears to be decreasing in major urban centres,
particularly Dublin, but escalating in areas not previously noted for
significant criminal activity, such as Mayo, Roscommon, Kerry and
Tipperary. We have therefore both a shift in the nature of criminal
activity and a significant new trend in its location. A possible
explanation is that, due to the success of dedicated Garda operations,
crime is being shunted around, changing in form as it goes, so what we are
experiencing is not the elimination of crime, but its displacement.

It follows also that, if criminals are being forced to travel longer
distances to pursue their professional activities, they will seek to
increase yields to cover increased overheads: the Dublin street pickpocket
becomes an armed robber when forced by increased Garda vigilance to travel
to Wexford or Portlaoise. Thus, crimes become less frequent, but more
serious. This scenario, for which the latest figures provide some
substantiation, is scarcely a cause for self-congratulation.

Rising crime is not an illusion. This is not to say that we require more
jails, but simply to acknowledge what is true. Between the 1950s and 1980s
levels of crime in most categories doubled every decade and would have
doubled again in the 1990s except for the trends detailed above.

Another unquantifiable is the undoubtedly massive decline in the reporting
of certain crimes. Scant information is available here about the detail of
crime recording today as opposed to five, 10, 20 or 30 years ago, but
British surveys reveal shifting patterns of public behaviour which, if they
bear even a passing resemblance to the reality here, must cast serious
doubts on all our crime statistics. For example, a 1988 British crime
survey revealed that, between 1984 and 1988, the numbers of crimes which
went unreported because of a belief that the police could do nothing about
them rose from 16 per cent to 21 per cent.

This factor tended to affect principally categories of petty crime, such as
burglary, larceny and vandalism, the survey finding that only one in four
incidents of theft from a motor vehicle and one in 10 cases of vandalism
was reported to the police.

This factor alone would go a long way in explaining the alleged decreases
in overall crime figures in this country in recent years.