Criminal Proceedings in Scotland, 2013-14

Annex B - Data Quality, Revisions and Data Processing

Data quality: Data capture

B.1 The CHS is an administrative system used to track individuals through the criminal justice system and has not been designed purely for statistical purposes. However, actions and processes have been put in place to ensure that the CHS is fully understood and is fit for purpose in terms of being the data source for criminal proceedings statistics.

B.2 Data standards are adhered to by organisations inputting data to the CHS in terms of the definitions the of data items and their corresponding values. These standards are agreed by the Integration of Scottish Criminal Justice Information Systems/ Co-ordinating IT and Management Information (ISCJIS/CIMI) programme and should ensure there is consistency across the justice organisations in the information they collect. Given a number of different organisations input information to the CHS this is crucial.

Further information on the data standards can be found here:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/archive/law-order/iscjis/standards

B.3 The following protocols also contribute to a shared vision across the CIMI partners and consistency in the data collected:

• The Scottish Court Service have devised a protocol for the handling of errors that may occur in the transmission of data between CIMI partners;
• The protocol for the investigation/resolution of disputed data between Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service;
• The protocol for sharing electronic information between CIMI partners.

Further information on these protocols can be seen here:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/archive/law-order/iscjis/protocols

Crime Classification

B.4 The Scottish Government has implemented a crime code classification framework to ensure consistent and comparable reporting between criminal justice statistical outputs. Crime codes contain groups of charge codes, which are the operational codes are used within Criminal Justice to identify crimes and offences. Individual crime codes are grouped into 35 broader categories, and further into 7 crime and offence groups, which are used in the main publication tables. A full listing of the 35 crime groups is set out at Annex D.

B.5 New charge codes are created by COPFS on a monthly basis, and shared with the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government then map each charge code to a crime code, and the list circulated to Police Scotland crime registrars, individuals within Police Scotland, the Scottish Police Authority and to relevant individuals within partner justice organisations for comment. Once any updates and/or amendments have been agreed for each month, the updated charge code list, together with its mapped crime code, is then published by the Scottish Government. The latest version on the charge code list can be accessed here: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Crime-Justice/DataSource/chargecodes.

Data quality: Data validation during production of the statistical bulletin

B.6 Validation processes are adopted during the production of the statistical bulletin. Key stages are outlined below.

B.7 In the early stages of producing the statistics automated validation procedures and manual checks are undertaken to identify any unrealistic data values. These are referred back to Police Scotland, SCS or COPFS (depending upon the nature of the problem) for correction or for explanation on any unusual circumstances.

B.8 Effort is made to clean up records for which key information is incongruent or missing (such as checking against case extract information provided by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS)).

B.9 Trends in the preliminary statistics are compared against case processing information published by COPFS and management information provided by SCS to ensure that the volume of court proceedings are consistent with reports from these organisations. Information is compared by court type (e.g. high court, sheriff court etc) to narrow down where any differences may lie.

B.10 Further checks on trends in the preliminary statistics are undertaken by crime type, sentence type and other characteristics to narrow down where any errors may lie. Policy experts within the Scottish Government are consulted as an extra level of assurance, to identify why any significant changes may have occurred which is then added to the bulletin as context to the statistics that are presented.

B.11 Similar consultation is undertaken with COPFS, SCS and Police Scotland wherein preliminary results are shared with them purely for quality assurance purposes. Their insight at an operational level provides invaluable feedback and informs whether further investigation on the statistics is required.

B.12 Further quality assurance and checking is undertaken on the statistics by members of Scottish Government Justice Analytical Services support staff when preparing the excel tables. Scottish Government statisticians, who have not been involved in the production process, check the results further and highlight issues that may have gone unnoticed.

Issues to be aware of when interpreting the statistics

B.13 The number of prosecutions and type of sentencing could be influenced by operational practices within the justice system. For example it is known that there may be times when the police report an offence to the procurator fiscal but, when the facts and circumstances are examined by the procurator fiscal, they decide to libel an alternative charge which may be less serious in nature and penalty. There are rare occasions when such decisions are made but unfortunately, the charge is not then updated on the computerised records. Changes such as this have been made where observed; however, it is likely that some other occurrences exist which have not been amended. There is nothing to suggest that the scale of this issue is large enough to alter the overall trends reported.

B.14 In recent years, we have carried out much more extensive quality assurance with external agencies. The purpose of this is to ensure the accuracy and quality of the statistics published herein. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) have identified that there may be a small number of court proceedings (often involving multiple charges and of a complex nature) which are being recorded as separate court cases which, in fact, should only be reported as one. The effect of this would be to over-estimate the true number of court proceedings.

B.15 Initial investigations suggest that this affects all crime types, though to varying degrees. Further work will be carried out in preparation for the next publication of Criminal Proceedings in Scotland with a view to quantifying the extent of the problem and identifying whether a change in processing methodology is required.

B.16 Information on the number of cases which received a highest disposal of fiscal fine, fixed penalty, compensation order and combined fiscal fine and compensation order are presented on the Crown Office website; and have been reported in Table 1. The number of people who received these disposals as identified by CHS are also presented for comparison.

B.17 The way that Crown Office disposals are recorded in CHS was altered after summary justice reform. Previously, CHS did not consistently record when a procurator fiscal fine or fixed penalty had been issued, and, when it was recorded, it was not possible to derive the relative numbers of each. CHS began to record fiscal fines and fixed penalties consistently under separate codes following summary justice reform. During the transition to the use of the new codes however, in 2008-09 and 2009-10, CHS continued to record, respectively, 2,700 and 500 pre-SJR codes representing a combination of procurator fiscal fines or fixed penalties, although it is not possible to separate the numbers of each. These numbers are now much lower.

B.18 It is not currently possible to extract information on some of the other COPFS disposals, e.g. warnings and no actions, from CHS.

Revisions and Data Processing

B.19 The CHS, which holds information on the outcome of court proceedings, is not designed for statistical purposes. It is dependent on receiving timely information from the Criminal Justice organisations, while some types of outcome, e.g. acquittals, are weeded after a prescribed length of time. A pending case on the CHS is updated in a timely manner but there are occasions when slight delays happen. Recording delays of this sort generally affect High Court disposals relatively more than those for other types of court, as the most complex and lengthy trials are held in the High Court.

B.20 The figures given in this bulletin reflect the details of court proceedings as recorded on the CHS and as provided to the Scottish Government up to the end of July 2014. Any subsequent updates on court disposals made will be incorporated into future bulletins and therefore some figures for 2013-14 (in particular those relating to the High Court) are likely to be subject to minor revisions.

B.21 These recording delays mean that figures for 2013-14 should be considered provisional as future bulletins may provide updates. We estimate that the 2013-14 bulletin contained a small undercount of around 40 people with a charge proved in 2013-14, less than 1 per cent of all people with a charge proved. Since the 2013-14 bulletin was published, a small number of High Court cases have been added to the court proceedings database.

B.22 A number of specific revisions have been made to the Criminal Proceedings statistics as described below. In all matters relating to revisions, these statistics comply with Scotland's Chief Statistician's current revisions policy: http://scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/About/CPSonRevisionsCorrections/Q/EditMode/on/ForceUpdate/on

Order of Life Long Restriction - Revision

B.23 During 2013-14, we noted that the number of order of lifelong restrictions (OLR) in the Criminal Proceedings database was lower than the number identified by SCS on their operational database. Further investigation showed that where there was also a custodial element to addition to an OLR being issued, the custody sentence was applied as the main disposal of the proceeding in the Criminal Proceedings database thus we undercounted OLRs.

B.24 The undercount of OLRs was the result of how the OLR was ranked in comparison to custodial sentences in the Scottish Government Criminal Proceedings database. When a person is proceeded against for multiple charges and/or given multiple disposals, the Criminal Proceedings database must identify which one should be reported as the main disposal. The database logic identifies which penalty is the most severe through a ranking system; disposals with a higher ranking take precedence over those which are ranked lower. This logic is used to decide which charge will be reported as the main charge within the statistical bulletin.

B.25 When the OLR disposal was introduced it was ranked lower than custodial sentences. As it is common for an OLR to be issued alongside a custodial sentence, proceedings where this was the case were assigned a custodial sentence as the main disposal with the resultant number of OLRs being an undercount.

B.26 In 2013-14, the Criminal Proceedings database was updated to rank the OLR disposal to be higher than the custodial sentence disposal. This change has ensured that the Criminal Proceedings statistics do not under-report the number of OLRs being issued in Scottish courts going forward. To ensure consistency with previously published information on OLRs, data relating to OLRs was re-processed back to 2009-10.

B.27 The backdating of the data means that there are now around an extra 15 OLRs being reported from between 2009-10 to 2012-13 which were previously recorded as custodial sentences. The 15 extra OLR disposals account for 31 per cent of the revised level of OLRs over the same period. The impact on the decreased numbers of custodial sentences is negligible as these stand at much higher levels than OLRs.

B.28 No other years or court disposals are affected by this change.

Crime types - Overall reclassification

B.29 In 2013-14 there was an update to the classification of crime groups with 3 additional groups being added to the listing. Under motor vehicle offences, speeding and mobile phone crimes are separated out and under miscellaneous offences, urinating is now an additional category. This is consistent with the classifications in recorded crime. Please see Annex D for a full listing of this.

Obstructing a constable - reclassification

B.30 Since the last Criminal Proceedings publication the classification of charges relating to assaulting a constable under the Police Scotland (Act) 1967 section 41(1) have moved from the crime group of "Common assault" to "Crimes of public justice". More specifically, at crime level, these charges have moved from "Common assault" to "Obstructing a constable in the pursuance of justice".

B.31 This reclassification has been applied through the criminal proceedings series back to 2004-05. The total levels for crimes of public justice have therefore increased e.g. in 2012-13, 1,346 of the people convicted for these crimes (16 per cent) are from the newly classified charges bring the total up to 9,691 people. By contrast the common assault total has declined by 11 per cent as a result of this reclassification.

Data confidentiality

B.32 Information on the outcomes of court proceedings is publicly available. However, while our aim is for the statistics in this bulletin to be sufficiently detailed to allow a high level of practical utility, care has been taken to ensure that it is not possible to identify an individual or organisation and glean any private information relating to them.

B.33 Furthermore, to maintain the security and confidentiality of the data received from the data suppliers, only a small number of Scottish Government employees have access to the data. The only personal details received by the Scottish Government in the data extract are those which are essential for the analyses in this bulletin.