Implications of the integration process of the administrative records of criminality between the SPOA (Oral Accusatory Criminal System) of the Attorney General's Office (FGN) and the SIEDCO (Statistical, Delinquency, Offenses and Operations Information System) of the National Police of Colombia (PONAL), and the implementation of the "¡ADenunciar!" app on crime figures

Abstract

In 2017, the Information System [SIEDCO] of the National Police [PONAL], one of the main sources of criminality information in the country, experienced two important changes in the consolidation of its crime figures. The first, was the integration into SIEDCO of the administrative records of complaints of the Attorney General’s Office [FGN] Criminal System [SPOA]. The latter was the implementation of the “¡ADenunciar!” (“ReportACrime!”) app, an application that allows citizens to file some complaints through the FGN’s Internet webpage. These changes have generated important variations in the series of data that measure the criminality registered in the country, which prevent the comparability of crime figures in recent years in the country. The objective of this document is to explain how the integration and aggregation of criminality information was carried out, and what was its effect on the collation of statistical figures over time. The methodology used in this document is descriptive with a quantitative approach, performing a statistical analysis of the consolidated figures in the SIEDCO information system and other complementary sources of information that allow for characterizing the integration and aggregation of information. The results of the analysis show that the increase registered in the figures of criminality is the product of the information integration and not necessarily increases in criminality. Likewise, this advance in the integration and aggregation of crime information was the result of the interinstitutional synergy between the National Police and the Attorney General’s Office, which allowed the consolidation of information and the provisioning of a mechanism to facilitate citizens reporting crime.