HEROIN PRICE RISE DID CAUSE INCREASE IN ROBBERIES

Miranda Devine ("Spin cannot hide Ryan's sorry record", Herald, April 11)
is up to her ears in conspiracy again. She says that pre-royal commission
crime statistics were removed from the bureau Web site, making it hard to
test our suspicion that the jump in robbery was caused by a rise in heroin
prices. They were not.

If she had looked up our earliest crime reports on the Web site she would
have found monthly crime statistics for robbery (and every other offence)
going back to 1995, two years before the royal commission published its
report. If Miranda needs any help using the Internet perhaps she could call us.

If she is genuinely interested in the effect of the heroin drought on crime
perhaps she should look at our report on the topic published last year.
That's also on the Web site.

Dr Don Weatherburn, Director, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research,
Sydney