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Annex B - Quality, Collection and Coverage of the Court Proceedings Data
B1. The Criminal History System, which holds information on the outcome of court proceedings, is not designed for statistical purposes. It is dependent on receiving timely information from the courts and police force records offices, 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 a slight delay may happen. Recording delays of this sort generally affect High Court disposals relatively more than those for other types of court. The figures given in this bulletin reflect the details of court proceedings as made available to and recorded at SPSA, and as provided to the Scottish Government by the end of August 2008.
B2. During parts of 2000, a few police forces are known to have experienced backlogs in recording the outcome of some court proceedings for motor vehicle offences on the SPSA (then SCRO) database. At the time, information on disposals of such offences was generally only retained on the database for a couple of months from the date of disposal before being weeded off. Therefore, these cases were not included in the extracts of statistical data provided to the Scottish Government. The shortfall in the number of persons proceeded against during 1999/00 and 2000/01 is estimated to be around 3,300 proceedings in total.
B3. The police record very detailed information on statutory offences but this does not always correspond exactly to the categories in the Scottish Government classification of crimes and offences. The most important example in numerical terms is an offence under Section 41(1)(a) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967. This offence relates to "any person who assaults, resists, obstructs, molests or hinders a constable". The Scottish Government classification divides this into 3 categories - resisting arrest, serious assault and common assault, but this distinction is not made by the courts. The majority of such cases are thought to have been classed as common assault, and all the offences under this subsection have been so classified. The same problem arises in relation to a number of other statutes but, at the level of aggregation used in the bulletin, the numbers involved in cases where there is a change in the final crime category are thought to be small.
B4. Following the introduction of computerisation of case recording to the sheriff courts, some difficulties were experienced by police force records offices in distinguishing sheriff solemn from sheriff summary cases when recording the disposal information on the SPSA database. Where possible those cases where the court type was incorrect have been identified and appropriate changes made to the data held in the Scottish Government Court Proceedings Database.
B5. Data supplied by courts is publicly available information. 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.
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