By Charlene Gatt
FOOTSCRAY Police have denied fudging statistics to reduce official crime rates following a damning Ombudsman’s report into the state’s crime statistics and police numbers.
The report, which was tabled in State Parliament last Wednesday, found that “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 processed on the crime database had unrelated, unsolved offences – for which no-one had been arrested – added to their file.
Crime in Victoria is captured on the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database.
The report also found that crimes across the state were under-reported in order to reach performance and crime reduction targets.
Ombudsman George Brouwer found that there were “significant differences” between Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data, which recorded calls to 000, and LEAP data.
Mr Brouwer obtained CAD data for 12 metropolitan police stations, including Footscray, for two randomly selected days in November 2007 and April 2008.
In Footscray, more than 60 per cent of CAD crime events went unrecorded in LEAP.
But Footscray Inspector Ian Geddes said the discrepancy between CAD and LEAP data was due to a high number of false alarms, or cases where police have found no indication that a crime has occurred.
“It’s (the report) pretty much compared two systems that don’t correspond,” he said.
“The CAD system indicates what the call is, and then our reporting system is an evidentiary-based system where there’s sufficient evidence to support the allegation of a crime.
“If we don’t detect an offence, then we don’t report a crime.
“What this report tells me is that we’re going to far more jobs than we’re actually taking reports on, we’re going to a lot of jobs where there are no offences detected.”
Inspector Geddes said police had been called out to incidents like car thefts, only to find the car in question had not been stolen.
Inspector Geddes also denied that Footscray Police was involved in attributing unsolved crimes to offenders in a bid to boost the number of cases that had been resolved.
“It’s not a practice we condone, it’s not a practice we engage in here, to my knowledge. It’s not an appropriate way to use the system.”
Inspector Geddes echoed the Ombudsman’s call to update LEAP technology.
The report also found the operational workload of police was “poorly measured”, making it difficult to determine how many extra police were needed.
A police association report last year found that Footscray would need an additional 54 police officers to work at an optimum level based on the potential for crime in the district.
“The Ombudsman’s report validates the police association’s long-held concerns about the substantial under-reporting of serious crimes,” police association secretary-designate Senior Sergeant Greg Davies said.
“The report also highlights our concerns that members are required to spend too much unnecessary time on crime data – time that is better spent on undertaking the core policing functions of preventing crime and keeping communities safe.”
The matter has been referred to the Office of Police Integrity for further investigation.
