But some of the long time posters will chuckle with me ...
For the last few years on the board, residents have reported that crime statistics in the DR are not reliable. Only to have others pipe up and tell us that crime has decreased/increased, depending on which side of the political fence they place themselves. In some instances this 'to and fro' over the years has been downright comical with some of us stating clearly, in colorful language, that the numbers are 'crap'.
So, two researchers from the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard did a study comparing and contrasting the methods of reporting crime in Jamaica and in the Dominican Republic. Here is the working paper from April 2007. They state unequivocally:
"In the Dominican Republic there is no clear national count of reported crime. The counting of offenses in the Dominican Republic is left to the separate agencies of law enforcement (such as the National Division for the Control of Drugs) and, within the national police, divided up by different divisions responsible for their investigation. These separate institutions use different language, frames, and reports to record these data, making it impossible to sum them all up."
In summary:
"In the Dominican Republic, too, at least until the introduction of the new code of criminal procedure in October 2004, reforms of the justice system have concentrated on the modernization of policing. This strategy may have made sense initially, since the police were until recently, as the chief of the national police told us, “designed to serve a dictatorship.”
I found this working paper very interesting in understanding the background to why we cannot get proper crime statistics in the DR.
For the last few years on the board, residents have reported that crime statistics in the DR are not reliable. Only to have others pipe up and tell us that crime has decreased/increased, depending on which side of the political fence they place themselves. In some instances this 'to and fro' over the years has been downright comical with some of us stating clearly, in colorful language, that the numbers are 'crap'.
So, two researchers from the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard did a study comparing and contrasting the methods of reporting crime in Jamaica and in the Dominican Republic. Here is the working paper from April 2007. They state unequivocally:
"In the Dominican Republic there is no clear national count of reported crime. The counting of offenses in the Dominican Republic is left to the separate agencies of law enforcement (such as the National Division for the Control of Drugs) and, within the national police, divided up by different divisions responsible for their investigation. These separate institutions use different language, frames, and reports to record these data, making it impossible to sum them all up."
In summary:
"In the Dominican Republic, too, at least until the introduction of the new code of criminal procedure in October 2004, reforms of the justice system have concentrated on the modernization of policing. This strategy may have made sense initially, since the police were until recently, as the chief of the national police told us, “designed to serve a dictatorship.”
I found this working paper very interesting in understanding the background to why we cannot get proper crime statistics in the DR.
