During a three-day regional workshop held at the Courtyard Marriott in Barbados, The Strengthening Evidence Based Decision Making for Citizen Security in the Caribbean Project (CariSECURE), in conjunction with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) embarked on the monumental task of edifying more than 40 producers of crime and criminal justice statistics from eight countries across the region on the importance of implementing the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS).

The ICCS provides a framework for the systematic production and comparison of statistical data across different criminal justice institutions and jurisdictions. This means the ICCS is applicable to all forms of crime data at different stages of the criminal justice process (police, prosecution, conviction, imprisonment) at which they are collected, as well as to data collected in crime victimization surveys.

This regional workshop successfully concluded by raising awareness about the importance of establishing and applying common statistical concepts on crime and criminal justice data and providing guidance on implementing the ICCS through specific road maps and strategies for mapping national crime categories into the ICCS framework. It is anticipated that countries will complete the first round of the ICCS implementation by March 2019. UNDP, through CariSECURE, will continue to provide technical support to these countries as the outcome of this work will be reflected it the next steps of CariSECURE activities.