The conveyor of beautiful numbers

Scientists have found how the police and the UK hide the real statistics of crimes

The “Committee of Civil Initiatives” by Alexei Kudrin on Wednesday, March 18, presented the report “Criminal Statistics. Through openness to controllability. " This study of the St. Petersburg Institute of Law Problems has prepared for more than six months (you can get acquainted with full text here ); It is that in Russia, statistics on the state of crime are radically distorted. Data has been distorted for many years, as a rule, at the lower level - in police branches. But this is beneficial to the leadership of law enforcement agencies. The Ministry of Internal Affairs reports to improve the criminal situation in the country, although in reality this means only that out of 28.4 million reports of offenses (data for 2013), the police registered only 2.2 million. According to the authors of the report, the real level of crime in Russia is several times higher than the “drawn”. And in what areas to fight her, no one knows, because there is not enough data. The report of St. Petersburg researchers was studied by the special correspondent of Medusa Andrei Kozenko .

“Russian statistics on crime are unique. The degree of its details, volume and depth of comparable data is higher than in most countries of the world. However, it is practically not used to change criminal legislation, identify and eliminate social causes of crime, the preamble says to the study. “The statistics are distorted and has not been the basis for the formation of the state criminal policy for a long time, but only serves to evaluate the work of departments involved in the fight against crime.”

The Institute of Law Problems was established in 2009 by the European University in St. Petersburg. Over the past few years, the institute has been cooperating with the “Committee of Civil Initiatives” by Alexei Kudrin. Its political weight helps that the research conducted by the institution does not go nowhere, as is the case with most human rights reports. For example, in 2013, the institute prepared a large -scale report on the concept of law enforcement reform (the police were proposed to be divided into municipal, regional and federal). Shortly after the publication of the report, according to Medusa, his authors were invited by Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev and explained for several hours why this is impossible in Russian conditions.

The authors did not give up - and prepared a study on the accounting of crimes: on statistics, all the work of law enforcement agencies is based. This part of the work, in their opinion, also needs to be totally reformed. Alexei Kudrin was again ready to support scientists - he worked as the presenter of this presentation and gave the floor to invited experts - from the Minister of Open Government of Russia Mikhail Abyzov to professors from the Academy of Management of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The fact is that the foundations of current accounting were laid back in the USSR in 1968, and it was finally formed by the beginning of the 1970s. Since then, a little has changed, despite the formal cancellation of the “stick” system - when the disclosure of crimes was the main assessment of the work of the police and they preferred to take up those things, the disclosure of which was obvious.

According to the authors of the report, by 2015 this led to the fact that “the state relies on such distorted data that it not only has no idea about the actual state of crime, but also, evaluating the work of law enforcement agencies, sees only an artificially formed picture that does not change significantly for many years.” They pay attention to the fact that the last surge in the growth of registered crime and the simultaneous reduction in the share of disclosed crimes was in 2005-2006. That is, in those days when the previous Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia Rashid Nurgaliev decided to fight for the purity of statistical reporting. Gradually, this initiative came to naught.

“We only note that, according to the VNII Prosecutor General’s Office, the level of actual crime is more than eight times higher than the registered level,” the study is stated. In 2013, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs registered 28.4 million reports on incidents, of which 10.8 million were considered as reports of crimes. The rest of the messages concerned the neighbors rustling behind the wall and the like. Of the 10.8 million reports of crimes, only 2.2 million cases were registered, they were registered by police and other law enforcement officers. The authors of the study think that in the reality of crimes there were at least twice as much. And these are only those that the victims tried to declare. Natural latency - those crimes that law enforcement agencies did not know about - is not taken into account.

The creators of the study offer to compare the police investigator with the person who works on the conveyor. It produces a product - criminal cases, however, the materials were transferred to him - the operatives and the district police officers, and the controller from the supervisory authority - the prosecutor's office will be accepted. The quality of each unit of the product is estimated individually. If the criminal case is returned for an additional investigation, then the unit of the product was poor -quality - for this they will punish both the policeman and the prosecutor. However, the work of the unit is generally evaluated not by quality, but by the number of product. This leads to the fact that the conveyor standing at the conveyor is interested in the manufacture of simple parts, it will stay away from the production of complex.

Another analogy of the authors of the study is associated with medicine. If the whole system - from therapists in the district clinics to the Ministry of Health - would work according to the same principles as the police, it would look like that. The success of the clinic would be measured by the frequency of diseases among people living around. The growth of diseases in some direction would require preventive measures and led to a campaign to reduce incidence, for example, pneumonia. The patient would come to the doctor with pneumonia, and the doctor would write in the hospital map that the arrived - ARVI, because there should be few cases of pneumonia according to the plan. Moreover, I would have invented a way to hide the wrong diagnosis from the inspectors. The distorted reporting would go upstairs to the instances, the picture of the health of the nation would eventually be distorted, budget funds for the prevention of pneumonia would be spent inefficiently. “This is exactly what has been happening in the law enforcement system for decades,” the authors of the report insisted.

The system of accounting for crimes is improving over the years, but, the authors of the document, not quite in that direction, believe. With the advent of computers and experienced users in the police, part of the workflow has become electronic. However, the work from this became no less, but more, because paper statistical cards (they are filled with police and the prosecutors are filled; from them, reports are formed), it is necessary to fill out along with electronic ones. “The process of collecting statistics, even with enhanced control, does not have additional channels for verification of reliability, thereby not a significant increase in knowledge about crime does not occur. The solution to the problem of the reliability of statistics on the state of crime cannot lie only in technological solutions, ”the study says.

Statistical data are closed from all those who wish to study them. On the website of Rosstat, you can find statistics on crime in Russia only until 2003. In the open data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation - until 2008, the information collected later - only for official use. The Prosecutor General’s Office, the authors of the study believe, makes an attempt to “change the approach to publishing data on the state of crime,” but this is nothing more than an attempt. So, in 2013, the portal of legal statistics Crimestat.ru began to work. “Having visited the site, you can find out that the Republic of Tuva is a long-term murder leader for 100 thousand people, half of the criminals in Moscow have primary education, and Russia occupies 3rd place in the world in the world in the world after the United States and Mexico,” the authors of the report noted, indicating that it is impossible to summarize this information to improve the situation with the country as a whole.

According to Medusa, the basis of the published study is the six -month work of its authors in police sections of different cities in the country. They observed the process of registering applications, interviewed the police. Two ways identified by them not to deteriorate statistics are known. The first is not to register citizens' statements. To speak their teeth, keep them in the department for several hours, until they get bored and they themselves will not leave. You can politely write down the readings in the notebook, promise to call back and never do this. In theory, this part of the police is checked - and can punish those responsible, but in fact this does not happen. For example, in Dagestan in 2013, as many as two cases of refusal were recorded to accept a statement from the victims.

The second method: register the application, but make any decision on it, except for the initiation of a criminal case. As a rule, a resolution on refusal to excite. A cult phrase from the criminal series of the 1990s: “What cruel suicide”-about a corpse with several gunshot wounds-just describes this method. The authors of the study call this sphere the most “gray” - the most seriously verified. They cite the example of Yekaterinburg and the Sverdlovsk region, which in 2012 showed a 20 percent reduction in crime, reached fifth among the most non-criminal constituent entities of the Russian Federation. And at the same time, the checks revealed almost four thousand illegal failures to institute criminal cases.

The report provides statistics on the most frequent crimes committed in Russia. The thefts in the past few years have been registered by the police more than 800 thousand times, in almost 1.2 million cases, criminal cases were not initiated after the appeal of citizens. For other crimes against property - theft, causing damage, destruction of property - criminal cases were initiated only in 30 thousand cases, and there were almost 950 thousand refusals. In low crimes against the health of citizens, a similar picture is almost 15 thousand initiated cases against 920 thousand refusals in excitement. The percentage of initiated cases is growing in two cases - if we are talking about serious crimes or those that are easy to reveal. In cases related to drug trafficking, almost 60 thousand initiated cases and only 10 thousand failures. According to the article “Banditism” - 54 initiated deeds and only one refusal to initiate.

The formation of inaccurate reporting occurs at the lower level, but for the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Investigative Committee, this situation is beneficial. The better their indicators, the more budget they can count next year. This leads to the fact that the bureaucratic apparatus of law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly. For example, in the Investigative Committee, the authors of the report say, two years after its creation, only half of the employees worked as investigators in criminal cases. In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, since 2010-11, the apparatus has occurred while reducing the number of employees of the lower units.

At the same time, it cannot be said that in Russia the situation with criminal reporting is bad compared to other countries. For example, in the USA there is no centralized accounting at all. In place, numerous hundreds of polls are carried out instead. Since 1972, the American Ministry of Justice has been conducting a “National Victimization Poll” to understand the “gray” crime zone. In some states there is its own collection of more detailed criminal statistics. In the Czech Republic, criminal statistics are publicly available, but there is only data on the disclosed crimes. In Germany, it is centralized, but only police officers lead it, and tax or financial crimes are not included in it.

In Kazakhstan, where a picture similar to Russia was observed for many years, the authorities made a strong -willed decision to stop hiding crimes, giving guarantees that none of the lower police officer would be dismissed for “bad” statistics. This led to the fact that in Astana, where 3-4 thousand crimes a year have been recorded over the past 15 years, a jump in up to 15 thousand crimes per year occurred. But in general, the crime growth in the country amounted to almost 100%. But this is not a surge - before these crimes were simply not fixed.

In their recommendations, experts at the Institute of Law Problems offer three simultaneous ways to correct the situation in Russia with crime statistics. The main proposal is the creation of an independent separate department, which will be engaged in reporting; Its representatives should work even in the regional police departments (we are talking about the rewarding of employees who are engaged in statistical cards now). The authors of the study propose to give more authority to collect statistics to the Prosecutor General as a supervisory authority. And finally, they want statistics to be open to those who need it and who could do public control.

It was assumed that experts from law enforcement agencies invited to the “Committee of Civil Initiatives” would criticize the study, but in reality they almost agreed with him. No one understood only proposals for the creation of an independent statistical department - "in Russia now there can be nothing independent of anyone."

“The main thing is that the problem is finally raised. She is, she permeates all law enforcement agencies, ”said Oleg Insarov, head of the legal statistics department of the Russian Prosecutor General. “We are not for creating some separate accounting structure-this is a political solution, we are for creating a system that does not allow distorting reports.” He said that only last year more than two thousand facts of distortion of statistics were revealed, but no one suffered punishment - the law enforcement agencies did not pass.

“According to the contents of the report: I agree with the assessment, but we disagree in the sentences,” said the criminologist, retired major general Vladimir Ovchinsky. - The authors offer evolutionary romanticism, and I am talking about revolutionary realism. It is necessary to change the political approach to statistics. It is necessary to give real data on murders, robberies and especially the loss of people - that's where the abyss is, believe me. ” Assistant Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, his former deputy Valery Kozhokar promised that there would be a bill that would radically change the accounting system - the proceedings will begin from the moment the application enters into a single register; Such a scheme appeared in Ukraine in 2012 with the adoption of a new Code of Criminal Procedure there, and Kozhokar says that it is based on the development of Russian scientists.

One of the co -authors of the study, Maria Shklyaruk, told me that after the presentation, the document will be sent to all law enforcement agencies. Minister Abyzov already proposed on his basis to draw up a plan for the development of criminal statistics in Russia.

Andrey Kozenko

Moscow