Eurostat, the statistical arm of the European Union, published an annual crime report that surprised many people. It claimed that the Czech Republic had the seventh-highest murder rate in the EU. Anyone who logged on to the Czech Position site between the evening of Dec. 2 and following morning would have seen a story titled, “Homicide rate increases in CR as violent crime drops.”
It was a nice, snappy story that did what a good story should: challenge common wisdom with new facts. But some people who read the report’s conclusions were skeptical — among them a journalist with Radio Prague — as good reporters should be.
Eurostat’s Crime and Criminal Justice report for 2010 said that the average homicide rate for 2006–08 was 2.03 per 100,000 and Prague was even higher, at 3.06 per 100,000. For 2008, the last year covered in the report, some 202 homicides were counted. Oddly, while the homicide rate was high and increasing, the level of violent crime was declining.
The only problem is that those facts as presented by Eurostat may not be true. When various editions of the annual Crime and Criminal Justice report are compared, a problem with the Czech data becomes glaringly evident.
A reporter from Radio Prague’s English section contacted Czech Position to say that the report was based on the wrong data from the Czech Police. While the report states that the figures for all EU countries are homicides excluding attempts, the Czech Police might have sent figures that reflected something else.
“All the data that we report as homicides include not only completed homicides but also planned and attempted murders. … We put all these murders together because the line of investigation is the same, regardless of whether the deed was done,” Pavla Kopecká, spokeswoman for the criminal investigation unit of the Czech Police, told Radio Prague.
This higher figure pushes the Czech Republic from the lower half of the rankings up to near the top, with Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Bulgaria and Romania.
We immediately pulled the story from website until the situation could be clarified. Eurostat told Czech Position that it stands behind its report.
“According to our information the current figures for homicide in the Czech Republic do not include attempts. Eurostat receives its data from the appropriate statistical authorities in the Member States, together with associated metadata concerning methods and definitions,” Delia Bistreanu of Eurostat’s media and institutional support department told Czech Position.
“In the case of countries whose definitions vary from the accepted definitions, this is indicated in the notes. It might also be added that if attempted homicides were included, one would expect much higher figures, whereas they are in fact similar to a number of other European countries,” Bistreanu said.
The charts in the Eurostat report do not include any notes regarding the Czech data. There was a footnote for data from Latvia, however, stating that those figures did include attempts. As a result, Latvia was not given a ranking.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
When various editions of the annual Crime and Criminal Justice report are compared, a problem with the Czech data becomes evident. The reports include homicide figures for all EU countries tracked over at least six years. The 2009 and 2010 editions have significantly higher figures for the same years than the ones found in the 2007 and 2008 editions.
In the 2009 and ’10 editions, for example, homicide figures for 2004, ’05 and ’06 were 227, 186 and 231 incidents, respectively. The 2008 edition gave the respective figures for those same three years as 137, 104 and 136; while the overlapping figures from the 2007 report (which only includes data up to 2005) match the 2008 report.
Similar discrepancies occur for every year that can be compared between the two sets of reports. The murder rate for 2006 was 1.33 per 100,000, if the lower figure is used. No explanation for the change in figures is provided in any of the reports, although significantly updated figures are usually noted by Eurostat.
Czech Position asked the Czech Police to provide homicide data excluding attempts for all the years in question. We received a set of data charts that matched the higher figures used in the most recent Eurostat report, including 202 homicides for 2008. The Czech Police said in the accompanying e-mail that this was the data it had at its disposition.
The tables, while extensive, do not include any breakdown of actual homicides versus attempts, or any definitions of how the terms in the report are used. The figures are, however, broken down by whether the homicide was part of a robbery, sexually motivated, a contract killing and other categories.
