REDUCED FIGURES DO NOT MEAN FALL IN CRIME

Recent remarks by the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, about the failure
of successful drug busts to make a dent in the street price of drugs may
have been rather more telling than he intended. Mr Byrne, speaking at the
prize-giving ceremony of a Garda-sponsored anti-drugs art competition for
school goers, expressed concern at the fact that recent drug seizures had
made "no impression" on the street price of the drugs concerned.

One might expect, he said, that such hauls would be followed by increased
street prices due to reduced supply. "When you have seizures and the price
remains level," he observed, "it would cause you to wonder how much drugs
there are out there". It would indeed. But it would make you wonder about
one or two other things as well, such as crime figures, for instance, or
more precisely, the reliability of crime figures as an indicator of
societal well-being. Earlier this year, the Garda published figures which
indicated that, during 1997, for the second year in succession, there was a
significant decrease in the level of crime in this society. Overall crime,
we were told, had decreased by 10 per cent during 1997.

Of themselves the figures were above reproach. There may be some minor
issues of statistical seepage arising from changes in criteria or
methodology but broadly speaking the figures arrive in the form of a
neutral statement of statistical reality.

However, as with so many things, it was the spin these figures received
that rendered them questionable. They were released in a mood of
self-congratulation and no little triumphalism on the part of Garda
authorities and political leaders. They were presented to us as evidence
that our society, after a period of some cause for concern, was becoming
healthier again.

They were jumped upon by a number of commentators who suggest that anyone
who raises issues of a disintegrating social fabric is at odds with the
facts. The message was clear: there was not, after all, a serious or
escalating crime problem in Ireland, and to suggest there was amounted to
"hysteria".

This, I believe, has had a number of important but invisible disorientating
effects on the public mind. It has, above all, suggested to people that
they cannot trust their own sense of reality. In truth, most people, in
their hearts, do not believe the statistics. It is not so much that they
are capable of suggesting where the figures are wrong, as that they cannot
find themselves in agreement with the meaning attributed to such figures.

For more than 20 years now there has been a growing sense of slipping into
the morass of violence and social decay, and a sense also that this
impression is neither entirely the consequence of media hype nor a figment
of anyone's imagination. Generally speaking, the feeling people have about
crime being on a steady increase is borne out by statistics going right
back to the 1950s. Crime in Ireland has more or less doubled with each
decade since the 1950s. The 1960s brought to an end the era of low crime
levels; in particular the period from 1966 to 1971, when crime levels
doubled. The 1970s saw an increase of a further 150 per cent. By 1981, the
level of crime was five times what it had been just 20 years before and
this figure has since grown by 15 per cent, following a minor dip in the
mid-1980s.

Any way you measure it, Ireland is now far more dangerous than half a
lifetime ago - three times more dangerous for the citizen and five times
more dangerous for the citizen's property. These statistics also conceal
the fact that patterns of crime have in recent years had an increasing
connection with drugs and in particular with the street price of drugs.
There are two very important points to be made about this development. The
first relates to the nature of crime and its relationship to the quality of
our society, to the distinction between crimes which are aggressive and
crimes of, ostensibly, a more passive nature.

Most of the crimes which end up in Garda statistics are of a visibly
offensive/aggressive nature. Something has been done to somebody and they
have reported it, or something has been done and the perpetrator has been
caught. Drug-pushing, for all the misery it creates, is not like this. It
is neither offensive nor aggressive in the sense that, say, a mugging might
be so described.

It is a crime in which the victim colludes and is therefore rarely
reported. The drugs culture, therefore, shows up in crime statistics only
when a seizure is made and a perpetrator caught. Firstly, therefore,
statistics which exclude so much of our crime-related misery, by virtue of
the intangible nature of this form of crime, are not reliable indicators of
the health of our society and should not be welcomed as though they were.

The second point relates more specifically to the observations of the Garda
Commissioner, quoted above. It is generally agreed that perhaps a majority
of crimes are now drug-related in the sense that they are carried out by
people seeking the price of a fix. Generally, this takes the form of theft
of money or consumer durables which can be sold or exchanged for drugs. As
the Commissioner stated, street prices for all illegal drugs have not
increased for several years. In fact, there is considerable anecdotal
evidence that drugs are now much better "value for money" than they were
five years ago - a time of relative scarcity - with some addicts reporting
that prices for certain substances have halved in that time. During this
time, the prices of most other goods have increased.

In the past five years, for example, cumulative inflation in respect of
both wages and consumer goods has amounted to, in round figures, 20 per
cent. This being so, it follows that a drug addict setting out this morning
in search of the wherewithal for a fix requires only somewhere between 50
per cent and 80 per cent of the funds or goods he or she would have
required for the same purpose five years ago. This means that, for example,
just three or four stolen video recorders are necessary to achieve the end
which required five video recorders five years ago. How are we to know that
this is not the main determinant of our fluctuating crime levels? In a
drug-saturated society, decreases in drug-related thefts can mean one of
two things: either there are fewer addicts consuming fewer drugs or there
are more pushers pushing more drugs and thereby keeping the price down.

The Garda Commissioner's remarks leave us in no doubt as to which of these
applies here. The reason for our diminishing crime figures is that we have
more drug pushers selling more and relatively cheaper drugs. By the simple
operation of supply and demand, therefore, reduced crime figures may be an
indicator of more crime, rather than less.