Regional System of Standardized Indicators in Peaceful Coexistence and Citizen Security: 2008-2013

The Regional system of standardized Indicators in peaceful coexistence and Citizen Security (RIC) is a project through which 15 countries and two capital cities of Latin America and the Caribbean, have partnered to improve and compare their statistics on crime and violence. This initiative has been promoted and financed by the Inter-American Development Bank - IDB through the Regional Public Goods program under the coordination and execution of CISALVA Institute at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia. The citizen security indicators were designed, reviewed and approved by the project's partner countries, along with established definitions and methodologies for the standardizing of the collecting, processing and analyzing stages of the information flow in order to support the quality of the data published. These indicators were reviewed in various regional boards, resulting in the improvement of some of them and the selection of additional citizen security indicators. The indicators are obtained via administrative records and others via surveys. In order to ensure the comparability of the indicators, a standardization process of concepts relating to the variables of time, place, person and circumstance was developed.