The number of crimes in the country has grown drastically over the past decade, new research shows, debunking optimistic but unconvincing reports to the contrary favored by law enforcement agencies.
A total of 3 million crimes were registered nationwide in
2009, according to official statistics, but the real number of crimes committed
that year — including unreported ones — stood at 26 million and will reach 30
million by 2020, according to a research group with the General Prosecutor's Office
Academy.
The number of crimes has been growing by 2.4 percent a
year, with millions of wrongdoings going unreported, the group said in a
mammoth 840-page volume that took 10 years to produce and was published last
week.
In contrast, Investigative Committee head Alexander
Bastrykin reported in October that the number of crimes in 2010 had plummeted
by 13 percent.
Official statistics show a drop in the number of murders
— from 34,200 in 2001 to 18,200 in 2009 — but they only reflect the number of
criminal cases that were opened, the study said.
Taking into account reported murders where no cases were
opened, the figure would stand at 46,200 for 2009, the group said. But even
this figure appears incomplete, considering there were 77,900 unidentified dead
bodies found that year and another 48,500 people were reported missing.
Academy professor Sergei Inshakov, who headed the
research group, declined to comment Friday, saying only that “everything can be
found in the book.”
Calls to the Interior Ministry's press service went
unanswered.
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika indirectly
acknowledged the problem last year, telling the Federation Council in April
that while the number of registered crimes had dropped by almost 7 percent from
2008 to 2009, the number of reported crimes that police had refused to register
was growing, the judicial news agency Rapsi reported.
Vladimir Ovchinsky, an adviser to the Constitutional
Court's chief justice, said on Radio Liberty on Thursday that the
large gap between official and actual statistics has been confirmed by numerous
other research papers whose authors “came to roughly similar conclusions using
different methods.”
Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist deputy on the State Duma's
Security Committee, said the latest study “almost completely” reflects the
current state of affairs in the country. “The level of unreported crimes is
very high,” Ilyukhin said by telephone. “Unreported crimes existed and will
exist, while their quantity is an indicator of the work of law enforcement
agencies."
The study echoes President Dmitry Medvedev's
criticism of official statistics on crimes in the North Caucasus, which he
called “nonsense” in November.
Medvedev has initiated an overhaul of the country's law
enforcement system, widely viewed as corrupt and ineffective, by introducing
bills to reform the police force and separate the Investigative Committee from
the Prosecutor General's Office.