The prettiest crime stats you’ll ever see

Researchers study how police conceal the truth about crime in Russia

On Wednesday, March 18, the Committee for Civic Initiatives, a liberal reformist organization, presented a report to several high-ranking police officials, titled Criminal Statistics: Manageability Through Openness. (.pdf, in Russian.) The St. Petersburg Institute for the Rule of Law spent more than six months preparing the research, which reveals that Russia’s crime statistics have been distorted for many years, usually at the grassroots level, in police departments. But this has been very profitable for the management of law enforcement agencies. The Interior Ministry has reported improvement in the fight against crime in the country, although in reality this only means that out of 28.4 million reported offenses (data for 2013), police registered only 2.2 million official reports. According to the report, the actual crime rate in Russia is several times higher than it appears, and no one knows how to deal with it because there isn’t enough reliable data. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Kozenko studied the St. Petersburg report.

“Russian statistics on crime are unique. The degree of detail, the scope, and depth of comparable data is higher than in most countries. However, it is almost never used when making changes to criminal law, or when identifying and addressing the social causes of crime,” the report states in its preamble. “Statistics are distorted and no longer act as a basis for the formation of the state’s criminal policy, and are only used for evaluation of the agencies involved in the fight against crime.”

The Institute for the Rule of Law was established in 2009 by the European University in St. Petersburg. In the past few years, the Institute has collaborated with the Committee for Civic Initiatives. Thanks to the political clout of former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin, the Committee’s founder, the institution’s research likely wouldn’t go anywhere, as is the case with most human rights reports in Russia. For example, in 2013 the Institute prepared a report on the large-scale reform of law enforcement agencies (proposing to divide police into municipal, state, and federal levels). According to Meduza, shortly after the publication of the report, the authors were invited to see the Minister of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Kolkokoltsev, who spent several hours explaining why conditions in Russia made such reforms impossible.

The authors did not give up, however, and they prepared a study on the accounting of offenses, collecting statistics on the total work of all law enforcement agencies. How police file and record their work, the report’s authors concluded, also needs serious reforms. Once again, Kudrin was ready to support the researchers; he led the presentation and gave the floor to the invited experts, from Open Government Minister Mikhail Abyzov to professors of the Academy of the Interior Ministry.

The foundation of the current accounting system is Soviet, laid back in the early 1970s. Little has changed since then, despite the formal abolition of the “heavy-handed” system: when crimes solved is the key factor being evaluated in police work, officers prefer to take on the cases where the perpetrator is obvious.

The report says this trend has led to conditions today where “the state is operating with distorted information, so that it not only lacks any idea of the real crime rate, but it also sees a very artificial picture of police work that hasn’t changed much for years.” The report draws attention to the fact that the last growth spurt in recorded crime rates (accompanied by a decline in the rate of crimes solved) was in 2005 and 2006. This was during the tenure of the previous minister of internal affairs, Rashid Nurgaliyev, who made a genuine effort to report accurate statistics. Ultimately, though, it never came to anything.

“We only note that, according to the Institute of General Prosecutor's Office, the actual level of crime in more than eight times the rate of that which has been registered,” the study states. In 2013, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia registered 28.4 million reported incidents, 10.8 million of which were recorded as reported crimes. (Other calls were about noisy neighbors, and similar minor complaints.) Of the 10.8 million reported crimes, only 2.2 million cases were registered by the police and other law enforcement agencies. According to the new study, the real crime rate was at least twice as high—and this is only counting the crimes that victims tried to report. Natural latency (that is, the crimes that were not known to law enforcement) isn’t counted at all.

The creators of the study suggest comparing a police investigator with a person who works on an assembly line. They produce a product, a criminal case, but its materials come from others, the operatives and the precinct, and the work is commissioned by a controlling oversight agency, the prosecutor’s office. The quality of each unit of the product is evaluated individually. If a criminal case is returned for further investigation, then the manufacture of that particular item was substandard. Both the case’s police officers and prosecutors would face punishment. However, the work of the unit as a whole is not assessed for quality or quantity. Because of this, the men standing at the conveyor belt are interested in manufacturing only the simplest parts, avoiding the complex ones that can get them into trouble.

The report’s authors also compare the situation in Russia’s police agencies to healthcare. What would Russian hospitals look like, the study asks, if everything from local physicians to the Ministry of Health operated on the same principles as the police? Clinics’ effectiveness would be measured by the frequency with which patients came in sick. A spike in any kind of illness would prompt preventative measures and a campaign to reduce the incidence of whatever disease reared its head. Maybe a person comes to the doctor with pneumonia, but the doctor reports it as SARS, because there’s a campaign underway to reduce the incidences of pneumonia. And the doctor would find a way to hide the phony diagnosis from inspectors. The misreporting would make its way up the chain of command, distorting the picture of the nation’s health. As a result, funding for preventing pneumonia would be inadequate. “This is what’s been happening in law enforcement for decades,” the authors of the report insist.

Statistical data is hidden from everyone to who wishes to study it. On the Federal State Statistics Service’s website, crime statistics are only available before 2003. The Interior Ministry’s public data only goes until 2008 (anything more recent is “for official use only”). The Attorney General, according to the study’s authors, has tried to “change its approach to the publication of crime data,” but it’s accomplished little, so far.

With these obstacles in mind, crimestat.ru, an online portal for legal statistics, was established in 2013. “Having visited the site, one learns that the Republic of Tuva is a long-time leader in murders per 100,000 people, half of the criminals in Moscow have only a primary education, and Russia is the world’s third biggest perpetrator of robberies after the United States and Mexico,” the report concludes, with some irony, saying it’s impossible and wrong to try to improve Russia’s crime situation by summarizing data like this.

According to Meduza, the published study is based on six months researchers spent embedded in police stations. They watched the process of filing reports and interviewed police officers. They identified two methods of tampering with statistics: first, police often simply refuse to file individuals’ complaints, stalling until people give up and leave. (In theory, this is against the rules, and officers can be punished for such behavior, though it doesn’t happen in practice.) In Dagestan in 2013, for example, there were only two recorded cases of refusing to take a victim’s statement.

The second approach to doctoring police records is to register a statement, but to phrase it as anything but a criminal report. Generally, this means writing a refusal to press charges. There is an iconic phrase from a 1990s criminal drama that describes this practice: police see a corpse with multiple bullet wounds and say, “What a horrible suicide,” and that’s how they write it up. This is what the study’s authors call “gray areas,” which are the most closely audited in Russia. They cite the example of Yekaterinburg and the Sverdlovsk region, which in 2012 showed a 20 percent reduction in crime, coming in fifth place among the least crime-ridden areas of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the study found almost four thousand cases of illegally refusing to initiate criminal proceedings.

The report provides statistics on the most frequently committed crimes in Russia. Theft in the last few years has been registered by the police more than 800,000 times, but another 1.2 million cases went unprosecuted, despite complaints by citizens. For crimes against property such as theft, damage, and destruction of property, criminal proceedings were initiated in only 30,000 cases, while there were nearly 950,000 failures to launch investigations. For minor crimes against the health of citizens, the story isn’t any different: almost 15,000 cases filed, against 920,000 refusals to initiate. The percentage of prosecutions is growing in two areas, however: serious crimes and crimes that are easily solved. In cases related to drug trafficking, there were almost 60,000 prosecutions and only 10,000 failures to initiate proceedings. Police opened cases into instances of “banditry” 54 times, while refusing to launch an investigation into complaints about banditry only once.

Inaccurate reporting happens at the lowest echelons of the police, but the situation suits the Interior Ministry just fine, where it’s interpreted as evidence of good performance and, more importantly, grounds for increased future funding. This process encourages more state bureaucracy in law enforcement. For instance, the report’s authors say only half of the staff at the Investigative Committee—an agency created just four years ago—are actually investigators. In 2010 and 2011, the Interior Ministry reduced rank-and-file employees, while growing its overall bureaucracy.

This is not to say that crime reporting in Russia is worse than in other countries. For example, in the US there is no centralized accounting. Instead, numerous surveys are conducted. Since 1972, the American Department of Justice has held a “national victimization survey” to try to understand the “gray” area of ​​crime. In some states, more detailed crime statistics are collected privately. In the Czech Republic, crime statistics available to the public, but they contain only data about solved crimes. In Germany, reports are centralized, but they only cover police reports and don’t address tax or financial crimes.

In Kazakhstan, where for many years there was pattern similar to what happens in Russia today, authorities launched a serious effort to make crime statistics more accurate and transparent, giving assurances of rank-and-file officers that they’d not lose their jobs for “bad” statistics. This led to a massive spike in reported crimes. In Astana, for example, the annual crime rate jumped from about 3,500 crimes (where the figure had remained for nearly 15 years) to a whopping 15,000 crimes. The reported crime rate throughout the country suddenly doubled.

In its recommendations, the St. Petersburg Institute for the Rule of Law offers three ways to improve simultaneously the situation with crime statistics in Russia. The main proposal is the creation of an independent department to deal with reporting, with representatives at all levels of the police (even in remote district offices). (There’s talk of reassigning to this service the men and women already working with crime stats.) The story also recommends granting more authority to the Attorney General to supervise the collection of crime statistics. Finally, researchers say more statistics need to be made available to those conducting public oversight.

It was assumed that the experts from law enforcement agencies who were invited by the Committee for Civic Initiatives would criticize the study, but in fact they almost agreed with its findings. The only thing police officials couldn’t understand was the need for an independent statistical agency. “Nothing can be independent in Russia today,” they protested.

“The main thing is that the problem is finally in the open. It exists, and it permeates all law enforcement agencies,” said Oleg Insarov, the head of the Attorney General’s legal statistics department. “We’re not advocating the creation of any particular accounting structure; that’s decision for the politicians. We’re for a system that doesn’t allow distortions in reporting crimes,” Insarov explained. It was just last year, he added, that auditors discovered more than 2,000 cases of misreported crime statistics, though not a single police officer has been punished. Law enforcement agencies, it’s clear, don’t turn on their own people.

“As for the report’s content, we agree with the assessment, but we differ in the proposals,” said retired criminologist Major General Vladimir Ovchinsky. “The authors propose an evolutionary romanticism, and I’m talking about revolutionary realism: the need to change the political approach to statistics. We need real data on murders, robberies, and especially missing persons—that’s where there are gaping holes, believe me.” Valery Kozhokar, the Interior Ministry’s deputy minister, promised new legislation that he says will radically reform the police’s accounting system: a criminal case will begin the moment a police report appears on a federal crime registry. The scheme appeared in Ukraine in 2012, when police there adopted a new procedural code, which Kozhokar says is based on the work of Russian scholars.

One of the co-authors of the study, Maria Shklyaruk, told me that a copy of the report would be sent to the offices of Russia’s various police agencies. Open Government Minister Mikhail Abyzov has already proposed creating a plan to develop a new approach to crime statistics based on this report.

Andrey Kozenko

Moscow