AIMING to tackle crime by sourcing information better, newly appointed justice minister Ionas Nicolaou wants to create an independent anti-crime committee to analyse statistics and data relating to crime, reports said.
The committee will reportedly comprise of experts who will have access to police data and will make suggestions, while Nicolaou also said that he wanted to strengthen the police’s ability to monitor telephone conversations “under specific terms” that were not specified. The police already have access to personal data in the context of criminal investigations.
Nicolaou told daily Phileleftheros that he wanted to implement an integrated IT system that would enable investigators to find patterns among kinds of crimes and cases. Part of Nicolaou’s vision as he described it is creating profiles for criminals in order to understand their motives, and where and how they operate.
“We need to go deep into every case and compare it with others,” Nicolaou told Phileleftheros.
Nicolaou could not be reached yesterday for comment and police spokesman Andreas Angelides said the police could not comment at this early a stage.
The police do not have computerised access to warrants issued by courts, which has led to such blunders as issuing a court writ in January to the name of a man who was murdered about a year earlier.
Angelides said at the time the force was looking into computerising data bases within the force and with external services to avoid incidents of this sort.
But according to Auditor General Chrystalla Georghadji’s 2011 report, only three out of the police’s 26 departments had fully digitised their systems with some departments reporting being in the early stages of the process. The problem persists across state services with even computerised services not being fully functional, Georghadji said.
Nicolaou has promised a number of administrative and judicial changes during his term, including creating a constitutional and administrative court, and setting up a court for international commercial disputes.
He has said that he wants to make the police more effective by decentralising power and merging departments, in order to clear the way for police headquarters to become co-ordinators and supervisors.
A total of 18 people were murdered last year, with police solving 11 of those cases, compared with 2011 when eight people were killed but only three cases were solved by the police, according to data made available by the police chief.
Following a number of police campaigns, break-ins were reduced last year by 12.6 per cent, from 3,379 in 2011 to 2,954 in 2012. But only 32 per cent of break-in cases were solved last year or 2011.
Nicolaou has also said that he will increase the frequency of patrols in quiet neighbourhoods and city hubs.