Wednesday, November 12, 2014
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end is nigh for norway’s electro heroes röyksopp
Noomi Rapace on her latest unsettling drama
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pAGE 15
capital to get a neW cycle officer pAGE 4
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J-Law on why the internet is her enemy and she just wants to punch it
« disaster ship captain gets 36 years pAGE 8 « pAGE 13
pAGE 10
no garda record of 1 in 4 crimes
Ireland’s true crime rate has been cast into doubt as a damning two-year investigation of the Gardaí found it does not record all criminal activity and wrongly classifies significant numbers of offences. In a 500-page exposé – which paints a poor picture of management and daily practices – the Garda Inspectorate, the force’s official watchdog, said the shortcomings were unacceptable. after an epic trawl of records, the watchdog said it was difficult to determine the scale of unrecorded crime, but suggested it could be around a quarter of all offences, based on evidence from other jurisdictions. The report found nearly a third (30 per cent) of all incidents on the force’s official record system Pulse – based on a sampling of 500 records – were not correctly classified. There was insufficient detail in another 16 per cent of the examined cases to determine whether or not the crime was properly recorded. a ‘significant’ number of crimes were wrongly recorded as non-crimes, it found, and therefore not handed over to the Central statistics Office, which produces official crime figures. The inspectorate said it reviewed 158 specific investigations. Of these, only 114 were recorded on the Pulse system and just 90 were designated as a crime. The watchdog said it disagreed with
by brian hutton
the classifications on a third (32 per cent) of the cases, while there was not enough detail to decide on another 6 per cent. It has blamed ‘systemic failures’ in the Garda for the misrecording of crimes. also, crime detection rates – convictions for offences, or the number of solved cases – are lower than those claimed, it was found in the report, which includes more than 200 recommendations. Furthermore, the investigation found particular problems with attitudes towards domestic violence within the force, finding some complaints were treated as a waste of time. It was found that recorded levels of racist and homophobic crimes are very low. It also criticised the investigation of serious crimes, including rape, child abuse, threats to life and aggravated burglaries by regular rank and file gardaí. ‘In other policing jurisdictions these types of crimes are usually investigated by trained detectives or officers assigned to specialist investigative units,’ the report states. Heaping further embarrassment on Garda top brass, the watchdog said some detectives are investigating complex crimes without any training.
LET’S HUG IT OUT: Dr Craig Spencer (right) – who was yesterday declared free of the Ebola virus and discharged from care – smiles as he receives a hug from head physician Dr Laura Evans at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He is America’s last known Ebola case
‘Systemic failures’ throughout force
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picture: getty
early bird catches the turkey, study finds CHRISTMAS comes but once a year – but we’re thinking about it earlier and earlier every year, To be exact, August 19, was the day we started to think about the turkey, tinsel and tree. That was the day internet searches for terms such as ‘Santa Claus’, ‘elf’ and ‘presents’ increased markedly,
shows a study by the UK’s Royal Statistical Society. It means we now think of Christmas three months earlier than in 2007, say experts. Analyst Nathan Cunningham looked at the volume of Christmasrelated Google searches in the past six years. In doing so he managed to work out the probability of each
coNtiNuEd oN pAGE 4 Keep Dublin tidy – Please recycle this Metro Herald when you are finished with it
week being defined as ‘Christmas’ or ‘not Christmas’ using an algorithm originally created for research into fossil pollen. He found that from a relatively late start of November 11 in 2007, we have turned our minds to Christmas in August for the last two years.