Muhamed Budimlić: Alarming number of rejected criminal complaints

A public debate is underway on the draft Laws on Police Officers and on the Procurement, Possession, and Carrying of Weapons and Ammunition. Muhamed Budimlić, former Minister of Internal Affairs of Sarajevo Canton, professor at the Faculty of Criminal Justice at the University of Sarajevo, and head of the SDP BiH Committee for Sarajevo Canton, addressed the public on this occasion. Budimlić provided an expert commentary on the social justification of significant changes and innovations in the system, reports Patria.

- The first phase of law enforcement institutions' actions is crucial, and it involves measures and activities to gather information about societal phenomena suspected of having characteristics of unlawful conduct, as well as information about the identity of individuals suspected of committing such acts, i.e., detection, and submitting the collected content in the form of reports to the competent prosecution authorities, i.e., solving the case.

These activities are largely within the jurisdiction of police institutions, specifically the cantonal criminal police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Sarajevo Canton. In line with the aforementioned obligation, it is particularly necessary to carefully consider information on the results of activities undertaken to assess the effectiveness of institutions in performing these duties.

It is possible and necessary to analyze reports from police institutions to determine the success of their actions in carrying out their basic responsibilities. How many criminal offenses out of the estimated number have they managed to detect and shed light on the basic elements needed to initiate proceedings, and what is the ratio between submitted police reports and decisions to initiate investigations and indictments issued by the prosecution to which these police reports were submitted. It is particularly important to analyze the causes that can be reasonably claimed to have contributed to the non-detection of offenses or the non-initiation of criminal prosecution.

Official statistical sources of institutions show an alarming number of rejected reports, i.e., criminal complaints, by competent prosecutor's offices in relation to the number of submitted reports on committed unlawful conduct. Furthermore, numerous indicators are observed in the reports of official international organizations, results of relevant scientific research, and reports of non-governmental organizations, which point to numerous unregistered criminal phenomena in Sarajevo Canton that are not detected, nor is the process of registration and reporting to the competent prosecution authorities carried out, the so-called 'dark figure of crime'.

Finally, but very importantly, it is noticeable that in the structure of submitted reports, there is a disproportion concerning the structure of criminal offenses for which reports are submitted. It is particularly noticeable that reports for so-called general criminal offenses are the most represented, a term unjusitifiably accepted in police practice, while the number of submitted reports for some extremely harmful phenomena pointed out in public, such as criminal offenses against the economy and official duty, corruptive offenses, ecology, forest theft, serious offenses in traffic safety, peer violence among minors, cyberbullying, and similar, is only symbolic - states Budimlić.