By Bridie Byrne
WYNDHAM residents have welcomed an Ombudsman’s scathing report on the possible manipulation of crime statistics and police numbers among Victoria Police.
The report tabled in State Parliament found “some police misuse the procedures for recording cleared crime to make it appear that more crime has been successfully solved than is actually the case”.
It claimed that some offenders whose crimes had been added to the crime database, had unrelated, unsolved offences – for which no one had been arrested – added to their file.
Wyndham Action Planners spokeswoman Lori McLean said police were fudging the figures.
“They are definitely dummying them down,” she said.
“There are so many things that are not being reported because the police don’t have time.”
Ms McLean said residents feared for their safety.
“For years we knew it would get to this extent with the lack of proactive policing,” she said.
“I am continually hearing of horrific stories of crime in Werribee. A lot of these crimes have happened in broad daylight.
“Werribee is not the place we used to know.”
Crime in Victoria is captured on the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database.
The report reveals that crimes across the state were underreported.
Ombudsman George Brouwer said that there were “significant differences” between Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data, which recorded calls to 000, and LEAP data.
More than 70 per cent of CAD crime events in Werribee went unrecorded on LEAP across two randomly selected days in November 2007 and April 2008.
Werribee Police Inspector Bill Weatherly denied obscuring the statistics.
“We are trying to get the crime statistics down. If we charged someone with 25 counts of burglary we only put it down as one count on the LEAP system,” he said.
Insp Weatherly said the police were prioritising their jobs in order of urgency.
“There would be a lot of jobs that we don’t get to but that’s like everywhere,” he said.
“Vans get called to criminal damages up at Presidents Park or down the main street of Werribee and we are writing those jobs off as detected.
“A lot of times we go there and there is no one there to report it.”
He said the lack of police was an issue always associated with Werribee.
“I have a certain amount of police and I have to police with those numbers,” Insp Weatherly said.
