This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
All crime incidents recorded on PULSE (Police Using Leading Systems Effectively) have been included in the study. Some offences relating to Fixed Charge Processing Notices (FCPN's) are not recorded on PULSE (e.g. if a person pays a speeding fine on time and no summons is issued) and consequently have not been included as incidents or re-offending indicators.
Yes. This study includes all detected crime incidents for the reference year of the re-offending indicators whilst existing CSO releases on detected crime incidents remove some incident types relating to Road & Traffic, Public Order, and Dangerous or Negligent Acts offences. This means this release is not directly comparable with existing CSO statistics of detected incidents. For more information see our methodology section.
A detected re-offending incident is a crime incident that has been recorded on the An Garda Síochána's (AGS) crime reporting system, Police Using Leading Systems Effectively (PULSE), where an individual that has been detected (identified as a suspect) has also been detected to a different historical incident also recorded on PULSE.
A crime incident is an incident in which on the balance of probability an offence has been committed.
The study identifies which crime incidents that took place from 2019 to 2024 were re-offending incidents.
Not necessarily, however, it is exceedingly rare for a person to be detected to a crime incident and not be responsible for the offence(s) relating to the incident. As many detected incidents in Ireland do not result in formal court proceedings in which a guilty verdict can be determined, simple detections have been used to provide an indicator of offending for the purpose of the crime incident re-offending series.
There are several different pathways or sanctions that people who are detected to a crime incident can take. Depending on the severity of the offence individuals can receive a number of or combinations of the following:
In this situation the re-offending characteristics of each individual associated to the incident are included in the study. So, when for example two people are both considered to have offended in a robbery, the study considers this to be two crime incidents.
Crime incidents in this release are categorised using a description and categorisation of the incident itself. Incident categories, while closely related to offences do not always correspond to the same grouping. This method of analysing offending and re-offending aims to describe the characteristics of the crime incident or event rather than describe the incident solely in terms of its related offences. A copy of the CSO’s Crime Incident classification can be found in the Background Notes of this release.
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