Author(s): Mykola Karchevskyi
The ability of the community to evaluate the functioning of the criminal justice system is critical for democratic societies. It is the result of the systematic interaction of justice bodies with the community and is achieved by readiness for discussions and disputes, the openness of statistical reports, and the availability of results of specialized sociological research. In Ukraine, there are not enough tools for the analysis of public data on combating crime. This makes it impossible to conduct high-quality scientific research based on data, limits the ability to assess the effectiveness of law enforcement activities, leads to unbalanced changes in criminal legislation, and complicates the monitoring of criminal justice reform. With the use of Data Science methodology and R software, we have developed a tool which is called an interactive guide “Combating Crime in Ukraine: Info graphic”. The result of our work is a web application presented in open access. This web application integrates data contained in the annual reports of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine and the State Judicial Administration for the period from 2013 to 2021. The systematized application data characterize the process of applying the criminal legislation of Ukraine according to more than 100 parameters. The conducted research is fully reproducible, and scripts for data collection, cleaning, and processing are publicly available. With the use of the developed tool for working with official criminal statistics data, the following conclusions regarding the state of combating crime in Ukraine are offered: together with the gradual decrease in the number of registered criminal offenses, a decrease in the number of convicted persons and softening of punishments, which are appointed, there is an insufficient implementation of the public interest in the proper, effective functioning of the criminal justice system and a lack of constructive professional communication. In particular, there is a tendency to primitivize countermeasures against encroachment on property, encroachment in the field of illegal drug trafficking, and corruption.