Technical experts involved in the production of crime and criminal justice statistics in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), will benefit from capacity building at a Regional Workshop to be held on November 21 and 22, at the Community’s headquarters, Georgetown, Guyana.
The workshop is an activity of the Crime and Violence Prevention and Social Development Project component of the European Union/CARIFORUM Crime and Security Cooperation Programme, being implemented under the Tenth European Development Fund (EDF).
The CARICOM Secretariat has collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to implement this capacity building initiative.
The workshop is intended to introduce participants, who are mainly experts from the main criminal justice institutions dealing with crime and criminal justice statistics, to the International Classification of Crime and Statistical Purposes (ICCS), its main uses, tools and challenges for its implementation.
Another highlight of the workshop is the establishment of a Regional Steering Committee (RSC) for the development of crime and criminal justice statistics. The Committee will provide the enabling environment for necessary in-country support for the implementation of the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS).
The Committee will comprise the Chairs of the Standing Committee of Commissioners of Police, the Standing Committee of Heads of Corrections and Prison Services, the Standing Committee of Caribbean Statisticians, the Chair of the Legal Affairs Committee, and the Chair of the meeting of Chief Medical Officers.
Other expected outcomes of the three-day workshop are increased awareness about the importance of establishing and applying statistical concepts on crime and criminal justice data and guidance on the implementation of the ICCS across institutions and jurisdictions.
The ICCS is an international statistical standard for data collection. It provides a framework which allows for statistical data to be systematically produced and compared across different criminal justice institutions and jurisdictions.
To this end, the ICCS is applicable to all forms of crime data, whatever the stage of the criminal justice process (police, prosecution, conviction, imprisonment) at which they are collected, as well as to data collected in crime victimization surveys.
