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Weekly Report - 22 July 2003

CHILE: Government flounders on alarming crime data

PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS MATCH REALITY, SAYS SURVEY 

The government of President Ricardo Lagos does not seem to know what to do about the undeniable fact that Chileans are becoming increasingly anxious about personal security. Over the past month it has twice trotted out interior minister (and Vice-President) José Miguel Insulza to deal publicly with security information that would normally have been handled far lower on the bureaucratic pecking order. 

He first appeared to present official crime statistics which at first sight appeared to justify public concern: they showed that in the first quarter of this year the number of reported armed robberies was 36.2% higher than in the same period of last year (and virtually unchanged from the last quarter of 2002). 

In the Metropolitan Region (Santiago and its environs), where the largest number of armed robberies take place, the increase was 25%. 

This category of crime has grown faster than others: the broader category of 'crimes of greater social connotation' (which also includes homicide, assault, rape, domestic violence and burglary) registered an increase of 11.02% over January-March 2002. 

Emphasis was placed, not on the increase over the past year, but on the fact that a plateau seemed to have been reached in the last quarter of 2002. This was portrayed as reflecting greater control of the situation by the authorities. 

And if over the year the number of reported crimes had increased, the official line went, that was because the public, more confident of an appropriate government response, was reporting more. 

It is crime that has risen. The notion that increased reporting, not increased crime, was at the root of media-inflated perceptions, took a hard knock last week, with the publication of a survey conducted by Fundación Paz Ciudadana and Adimark. This showed that over the past year the proportion of crimes reported has remained constant, so the rise in reports does reflect an increase in crimes committed. On average, 44% of all robberies, with or without violence, are reported. 

Corroborating this impression is the fact that the proportion of families with at least one victim of robbery or attempted robbery has been increasing steadily -from 30.6% in October 2001 to 36.9% in November 2002, to 38.2% in June this year. 

Also sharply up is the proportion of respondents who said they lived in great fear of becoming victims of a crime. This now stands at 14.3%, the highest level since May 2000. For the first time, also, the rate in the interior (14.7%) is higher than that of Santiago (13.5%). 

Insulza, apart from quibbling with details, opined that these figures showed no real worsening of the situation since the previous survey of the same kind. 

Longterm trend. A study conducted by the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo (ILD), a private think-tank, says that since 1997 the number of crimes 'of greater social connotation' in Chile have increased by 65% (with holdups rising by 232.6%). A parallel calculation shows per capita spending on security rising by 67.7% over the past eight years, which suggests that the outlays have been ineffective. 

The study says that private spending on security has increased faster than that of the public sector, which would make it the most ineffective. Undersecretary of the interior Jorge Correa has disputed this conclusion, pointing out that the study failed to compute some public-sector projects like the Plan Comuna Segura, which would raise the relative weight of government spending. 

Also questionable is the methodology used by the ILD to calculate the 'cost' of crime, which includes such things as the time spent locking up homes and cars, and the cost to criminals of spending time in jail.

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