Burglary case screening is a way to sort burglaries with a checklist to identify those that
police are most likely to detect. In this report for policing professionals, we summarise the
development of the first solvability-based case screening process for burglaries in Ireland.
This analysis was based on 49 534 burglaries reported to the Irish police force over 2014
and 2015. We whittled down a list of about 100 factors to a final case screening checklist
of 17 questions with big data analysis, including text mining with R, variable creation with
Excel formulae and regression with SPSS. After taking multiple factors into account, the
top five predictors of whether a burglary will be detected after 1 day of investigation are:
CCTV availability, suspect name availability, the motive is vandalism, a description of the
offender’s vehicle and a description of the suspect. We recommended that officers should
continue to investigate burglaries with 5 or more of the 17 factors on the case screening
checklist. If officers had used this checklist in 2014 and 2015, we estimate that they would
have continued to investigate 49 % of burglaries after 1 day and that the detection rate
would have increased by 50 % (from 9 % to 14 %). Identifying which burglaries are most
solvable and allocating the most resources to those is a promising opportunity for An
Garda Síochána to deliver a more cost-effective service and boost detection rates. The
next step is to conduct a pilot study to test the checklist.