After a bloody May that put the focus on his management and a peaceful June that gave him a break, the Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Hebercommunicated this Tuesday the first half crime figureswhich show a accelerating rise in homicidesas well as a further decline in the number of reported robberies.
According to figures from the Violence and Crime Observatory, during the first half of 2022 there were 188 homicideswhich implies a rise of 39.2% compared to the same period in 2021 and 8.7% compared to the first half of 2019when the Broad Front ruled.
On the one hand, the six-monthly records accentuate the upward trend that had occurred in the previous semester. After a significant drop in the first year and a half of management, the second half of 2021 had registered an increase of 5.6% in homicides in the year-on-year comparison, as reported at the time The Observer.
At the same time, it is the first time that in a first semester governed entirely by Luis Lacalle Pou —and his Ministers of the Interior Jorge Larrañaga and Heber— the figure registered in the same period of the last year of the Broad Front is exceeded, with Eduardo Bonomi at the head of the security portfolio.
Heber said that “people live safer than in 2019” and emphasized again and again the decrease in robberies, theft and cattle rustling in comparison with that last year of the Front’s administration..
Also, from the ministry they highlight that only 9% of the homicides were the product of robberies or seizures (a percentage that continues to decline).
“We started from a record figure in 2015 of 33, systematically going down, and today we are at a good figure, of 9 homicides, which are people who have faced crime and were not linked to it. We intend that this figure does not increase substantially in the semester,” said Heber.
no pandemic
After several months in which the government relativized the impact of the pandemic on the future of insecurity -which provoked a permanent debate with the opposition, which in some cases attributed all the responsibility for the drop in crime to this factor-, the authorities focused this time on the comparison of the 2022 data with that of 2019.
In this way, they argued from the Interior, “the security policy” of this government and that of the Broad Front can be compared without the factor of the health emergency.
Asked if that did not imply recognizing that there was an incidence of the pandemic in crimes, Heber replied: “The discussion is how much it affected and I don’t know. Now we are going to see it. It affected because, for example, now we have more homicides than in 2021, right? So naturally we do not deny because there were times when people secluded themselves, then they were less exposed. Now how much?” asked the minister.
In turn, he assured that the comments of several ministry officials, including himself, who repeatedly insisted that criminals were not quarantined, was due to the fact that the opposition attributed the drop in crimes only to the health situation. In Heber’s opinion, the results of the first years of the government were a mixture of the pandemic and good security management.
“From the opposition it was argued that it was all a product of the pandemic and it seems to me that it is not fair,” said the minister, for whom the coalition’s security policies are “much better” than those of the previous administration “because there are fewer crimes”.
Heber added that they are going to “wait until the end of the year to be able to compare a year without a pandemic (such as 2022) with 2019, which also had no pandemic,” and see how much the new imprint of “security policy” affects.
Month to month
Regarding the last quarter, the Ministry of the Interior reported that there were 29 homicides in April, 43 in May and 16 in June, although it was insisted that it is not pertinent to draw conclusions based on what happened in one or two months in particular.
“Us We are not saying that everything is barbaric because in the month of June there were only 16 homicides. With the same argument, do not put as a permanent figure what happened exceptionally in MayHeber argued.
That month, in which there was a wave of homicides only surpassed by a similar episode in 2018 -the year that there were more homicides-, led to a meeting with the president, Luis Lacalle Pou, in the Executive Tower where Heber had to present a plan to contain the situation. He also earned him an appearance in Parliament.
But Although he asked not to draw conclusions based on the data of a particular month, the minister said that the drop between May and June is due to the fact that the plan had an effect: greater police presence and the dismantling of criminal groups that supply narcotics..
At that time, the authorities attributed the series to a wave of settling scores, many of them in the Peñarol neighborhood. According to the report of the Ministry’s Observatory of Violence and Crime, in this semester 50% of homicides were the product of conflicts between criminal groups or settling scores. With 28%, it is followed by those that occurred as a result of a situation of domestic violence or related issues and 20% were due to spontaneous non-domestic altercations.
Heber highlighted that only 9% were the product of theft or seizure. The remaining 37% is due to other reasons or of unknown origin.
