Jackie Fitzgerald, Statistical Services Manager for the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research told ZDNet Australia the concept was being tossed around at the bureau.
"It's in the back of our minds to think about [introducing] this year," said Fitzgerald. "We regularly undertake planning and strategy [meetings] of how we undertake our business...but [monthly online reporting] is not a major new initiative we've committed to."
"We'd need to be convinced the benefits outweighed the impediments," she said.
If the bureau was to change from reporting crime statistics annually to reporting them monthly - or even weekly - it would mean an increase in the resources needed to deploy the data, according to Fitzgerald, adding there were further concerns.
"We'd have to change our operations in terms of how frequently we receive data from the police," she said. "We don't receive information from the police monthly so it would require a significant overhaul of their practices."
"At the moment we're able to easily conceive a 12 or 24 month trend," she added. "If we were releasing on a monthly basis trends would alter month to month. Crime is quite seasonal."
The benefits of monthly reporting would include satisfying a public desire for crime information. "People are very interested in what is happening with crime," said Fitzgerald. The politics that inevitably follows the release of annual data puts an intense focus on the release, and a benefit for the bureau would be having that focus spread out.
