Press Statement

Preasráiteas

25 March 2019

Increases in most crime groups in the year ending Q4 2018

Go to release: Recorded Crime Q4 2018

The Central Statistics Office has today (25 March 2019) published the latest Recorded Crime statistics. Recorded Crime Q4 2018 provides statistics for the full year of 2018 and includes previous years. It is again published using the category of Statistics Under Reservation, the category introduced to highlight concerns regarding the quality of underlying data from An Garda Síochána’s PULSE database.

The number of incidents of Fraud and related offences rose by 18.4% in 2018, while reported robberies (+11.3%) and sexual offences (+10.3%) continued to rise. The numbers of homicides (-10.8%), burglaries (-11.5%) and criminal damage offences (-7.2%) decreased in 2018 relative to 2017.

Commenting on the latest Recorded Crime statistics, Sam Scriven, Statistician said: “The publication of the latest Recorded Crime statistics provides the best available measure of crime reported in Ireland while informing users of concerns regarding the quality of the underlying data. The statistics show increases in the reporting of fraud and sexual offences. The numbers of burglaries and theft incidents both fell although there was a rise in the numbers of reported robberies.”

The Central Statistics Office intends, during April 2019, to publish statistics relating to the victims of serious crime incident types such as homicides, assaults and sexual offences. The publication of these statistics is in response to considerable user demand for such statistics. The analysis of victims will look at characteristics such as the sex of victims, the age at the time an offence first occurred and the time gap between when an offence occurred and when it was reported to An Garda Síochána, so as to provide some context to the reporting of such offences in Ireland.

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