But exactly how many is anyone’s guess, with police saying they are physically unable to reveal the full number.

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The reported offences remain “solved” or “cleared” in official crime statistics, including in cases where the charges failed to stick even in the early stages of the court process due to the deficiency of evidence.

It means that while police prosecutors may end up offering no evidence in the magistrates court against defendants, the case is still treated in official statistics as having been “solved” and formally closed.

Legal sources have raised concerns the inclusion of failed prosecutions, particularly those that were withdrawn by police prosecutors due to the weakness of the case, has artificially inflated police official clearance rate data – a key performance measure – and created a fixation on charging as many people as possible, even in cases where the arresting officer is aware of the insufficiency in evidence.

The practice of laying charges based on flimsy evidence was “rampant” when it came to property offences, such as break-and-enters, according to several criminal lawyers who spoke to The Courier-Mail on condition of anonymity.

Examples include a woman charged in June with three offences over a 2016 home burglary in which the keys to a car were taken and the car stolen.

The police brief outlined a single piece of evidence: a matching fingerprint on a torn piece of paper found in the car, which was recovered a week after the robbery.

Police prosecutors withdrew the case on the first mention in July after her lawyer warned he would be seeking scaled costs and indemnity costs if they pushed ahead given how weak its case was.

In another example, a man accused of a property offence was later charged with multiple other break-and-enters based on the fact they occurred in the same area around the same time.

This was despite police not having a single piece of evidence tying the offender to the other break-and-enters, according to his lawyer.

The charges were discontinued by the police before it went to a summary hearing.

But officially, the break-ins – usually one of the toughest crimes to crack, with a clearance rate of about a quarter – will remain “solved”, robbing the victims of any chance of restitution.

The Courier-Mail has received multiple unconfirmed accounts of one police prosecutor being pulled up by his superiors for reversing the “solved” status of offences in the Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange (QPRIME) system after the cases failed in court.

It is understood concerns were also raised about the pressure on police to charge people in a bid to boost clearance rates, regardless of whether they had sufficient evidence, during a December 2019 internal review into Police Prosecution Services.

A police spokesman confirmed that offences were classed as “solved” in clearance rate data when an offender was either arrested and charged, cautioned, issued a notice to appear in court or a summons or where an arrest warrant was issued, regardless of whether the charges were later dismissed in court.

He said the police were unable to reveal how many “solved” crimes involved cases where the prosecutors had withdrawn the charges or offered no evidence, pointing to the time it would take to retrieve the data.

While police must enter the information into QPRIME, he said it was a “manual process to pull the statistics as each record would need to be entered into.”

There is also no public data on how many “solved” cases involved instances where police deemed it was either not in the public interest to charge the offender, or where there was a legal impediment to laying charges.

The police spokesman said prosecution outcomes were looked at by its Prosecution Review Committee and denied “aggressive charging”, saying its Ethical Standards Command had identified no such complaints.

He said it conducted proactive audits of randomly selected stations, which would detect any such practice.

Several interstate police departments use similar methodology in calculating their clearance rates and do not take into account the end court result – a practice which aligns with the National Crime Recording Standard.

The Courier-Mail in June revealed the details of internal reports, obtained under freedom of information laws, on a string of cases where defendants were awarded taxpayer-funded court costs after charges against them fell over due to bungled investigations or faulty briefs of evidence.

Costs against the prosecution are awarded in cases where flaws in the police investigation are identified.

In one example, a police prosecutor reported it was “immediately apparent that the evidence was insufficient to secure a finding of guilty” on first glance at the brief.

Another of the cases involved alleged bikie Harley Joe Barbaro, 27 – a member of the notorious Barbaro family and brother of slain Sydney underworld boss Pasquale Barbaro.

He was awarded $4500 in court costs over a technicality about whether he was served a proper “official warning” notice against consorting with 15 known offenders.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the Queensland Magistrates Courts shows hundreds of cases are withdrawn by prosecutors each year for particular offence categories.

For instance, 1311 theft charges were withdrawn in 2018-19 of 14,737 matters finalised, with 12,902 offenders found guilty; the bulk of those after pleading guilty.

Terry Goldsworthy, a former police detective and Bond University criminologist, said “charging people simply to get a ‘clear-up’ in the knowledge there was no chance of a successful prosecution was pointless.

“It’s a waste of public funds. It’s a waste of the courts’ time. Basically it’s a miscarriage of justice where you know you’re almost abusing the process of arresting someone or charging them if you clearly know you have very little chance of success.”

Practices such as loading up offenders with charges as a lever to bargain for a guilty plea were difficult to detect, he said.

Mr Goldsworthy said the only reason police were able to expose a manipulation of crime data back in 2017 was because whistleblowers had come forward.

That then led to a scathing Auditor-General’s report finding Gold Coast district officers’ inappropriate practices “of altering crime data statistics have gone unnoticed or unchallenged at senior levels.”

“Gold Coast staff reported that an unhealthy focus on achieving performance targets, rather than data quality, has contributed to these results,” it continued.

“… Reported crime statistics are questionable at best and unreliable at worst, and should be treated with caution.”

The report found that Gold Coast district officers had solicited victims to withdraw their complaints to improve clearance rate data. Victims had been sent letters requiring a response within a week or the police would presume they wanted no further action.

A three-strikes policy had also been adopted where complaints were automatically withdrawn if the victim could not be contacted after three attempts.

The Auditor-General’s report revealed that of 839,097 incidents resulting in a charge between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the defendant was found guilty by the courts in 254,644 cases.

Among the recommendations was the establishment of a new crime statistics body – an election commitment of the State Labor Government.

But Mr Goldsworthy, who regularly delves into the data as part of his research, said the crime statistics body’s latest 2018-19 report’s value had deteriorated by the time of its release in March 2020.

“You are talking about something that’s nine months old, so what’s the purpose?” he said.

He said there was also no apparent way of requesting crime statistics outside of the annual report as you could in other states.

A Queensland Treasury spokesman said the 2019-20 annual crime report would not be released until early next year and referred the newspaper to the police for any specific statistical requests.