The NSO of the Dominican Republic and the Center of Excellence continue to partner to strengthen the national statistical system
From August 29 to September 2, the National Statistical Office of the Dominican Republic (NSO) received staff from the UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence (CoE) to continue working together to strengthen technical capacities of the institutions producing statistics on crime and criminal justice.
The mission began with a high-level meeting with representatives from the Ministry of Interior and Police, including the Minister of Interior and the Vice-Minister of Preventive Security in provincial governments, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the Ambassador of the Dominican Republic in Austria and the Director of Affairs with Europe, and from the National Police the Director General and the Executive Commissioner for Police Reform. The meeting highlighted the importance of having a comprehensive statistical system to understand crime phenomena and thus develop programs and policies aimed at improving public order and citizen security. Emphasis was placed on the priority of strengthening data from the Police and the Attorney General’s Office, the main producers of crime statistics in the country.
During the mission, the CoE focused its efforts on the adoption of the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) in the country. To this end, two workshops were held on correspondence tables between the Dominican Republic’s penal code and the ICCS. Technical representatives attended the event representing more than 30 institutions involved in the process of production and/or dissemination of statistics on the justice and citizen security sector in the country. The workshops explained what the classification was, its use and benefits, and how it is structured. In addition, practical exercises were included, in which the participants were able to map the crimes of the Dominican penal code to the ICCS categories and identified the key disaggregation variables for each crime.
In addition, the UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence was able to conduct an exploratory analysis of the general characteristics of the registration process of institutions such as the National Police, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, and the Center for Analysis of Data on Citizen Security. Finally, the CoE presented the Statistical Framework for Measuring Gender-related Killings of Women and Girls to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs of the Dominican Republic and the ONE. Both entities recognized that the framework adequately captures lethal violence against women and considered it important to include it in the conceptual frameworks for the production of national statistics and in efforts to generate data on this phenomenon.