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[Global Corruption Report 2005] Corruption and Crime
Azfar, Omar
Azfar, Omar
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"One of the fundamental roles of government is to protect the lives and property of citizens from criminals. We would expect corruption to lower the effectiveness of law enforcement, leading to higher crime rates. Criminals may bribe the police and avoid punishment, while corruption in the hiring process may undermine the quality of the judiciary and the police force. Anecdotal accounts suggest that corruption does indeed affect the police force and both the willingness and ability to commit crimes. However, previous studies have found only a weak relationship between corruption and crime.2 In ongoing work at the IRIS Center of the University of Maryland, we examined the links between corruption and two kinds of crime: theft and homicides. In each case we found a significant relationship, with higher levels of corruption associated with more crime. Theft There are two possible sources of data on theft: Interpol, for a large number of countries; and the International Crime Victimisation Surveys (ICVS), for a smaller number. However, the Interpol data comes from police sources and is unreliable, because crimes may not be reported to the police, and crimes may not be reported by the police to international agencies. This under-reporting is large in magnitude, and the rate of underreporting itself is highly correlated with corruption (see Soares in this report, page 289). Average crime rates calculated from the ICVS are measured with some noise but there is likely to be less bias. Hence, we used data on crime incidence from the ICVS. The ICVS collects data from approximately 1,000 respondents in 67 countries. Data is collected on both crime rates and crime reporting rates for a variety of crimes including burglary, robbery, bribery, fraud and assault. Of these crimes theft is by far the most prevalent, and hence measured with the greatest accuracy. Across the sample of 67 countries, 16.2 per cent of respondents had been the victim of a theft of personal property (other than car-related crimes) in the past two years. We found the rate of theft to be highly correlated with the World Bank Institute measure of corruption.3 This relationship remained statistically strong after controlling for various factors like inequality, urbanisation, literacy, contract enforcement and legal origin.4 Figure 24.1 depicts the relationship."(pg 285)
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2005
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0745323979
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With permission of the license/copyright holder