Safer Communities in Scotland: Page 9

3.19. The profile should be more than just a collection of information: data needs to be analysed and interpreted and a number of factors need to be taken into account [see Box 3.6].

Box 3.6 Factors to take into account in analysing data

Data integrity

Consider the accuracy, reliability and representativeness of the data

Time period

Analysis covering short time periods can be misleading and may be unduly influenced by small-scale fluctuations in crime, accident or disorder levels
The basic time unit for presenting data in the community safety profile should be a 12-month period (either a calendar or financial year)
Three years' data should be inspected to identify trends over time
Look for peak periods for particular offences, accidents or disorderly behaviour, eg theft from shops during the run up to Christmas

Force-wide/national contest

Where possible, the information should be placed in a force-wide or national context, eg overall crime rates for the local authority area can be presented alongside comparable rates for the local police division and figures for Scotland from The Scottish Office Central Statistics Unit

Geographic areas

Although the audit is intended to cover the entire local authority area, smaller areas within this larger area will have to be identified
A decision needs to be made about the smallest geographic unit that will be analysed. The partnership may decide to use police beat or ward boundaries
If rates are to be calculated for each of the small areas then census information needs to be available at this geographic level

Risk factors

The audit should not be overly-dependant on information on levels of community safety problems but should also investigate the factors that increase the likelihood of these problems occurring
Geographic areas that exhibit a clustering of risk factors should be identified

Presentation

Data should be presented in an interesting, easy to understand and meaningful way

3.20 The audit should allow smaller priority geographic areas within the local authority area to be identified. Information on individual offenders, accident victims, crimes, etc, is not needed for the audit. In any case, sharing data on individuals between agencies will be restricted by data protection legislation [see 3.55].

3.21 Information for the audit will usually be needed in an aggregated form, such as the number of violent crimes per police beat or per ward.

3.22 It is important to convert raw figures (number of crimes, accidents, etc) to standardised rates to allow comparison of areas. In general, figures should be related to the population at risk and different incidents need different denominators, eg fatal house fires and housebreaking can be expressed in the number per 1,000 households, crimes of violence in the number per 1,000 population, crimes against businesses in the number per 1,000 businesses (incidence rates).

3.23 Research shows that crime is not evenly spread among the population of an area, eg the 1996 Scottish Crime Survey showed that 13% of victims of violent crime accounted for 29% of all incidents recorded in the survey (these people had all suffered from three or more violent crimes in the previous year). As well as examining the incidence of crime and accident types, it is also important to look at the number of victims in a given area (prevalence) and the average number of incidents per victim (concentration) [see Box 3.7].

3.24 Identifying the areas and groups of people that experience above average high levels of incidents (hot spots) and suffer from high levels of repeat victimisation/repeat accidents can be useful in targeting resources on the most vulnerable and can potentially result in the greatest impact in reducing overall incident levels.

3.25 Rural areas, in general, tend to have lower crime rates than urban areas, although crime rates have been slowly increasing in these areas over recent years. It is important to identify individuals and places experiencing above average levels of, and largest increases in, crime, disorder and other community safety-related incidents.

3.26 Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful tools in analysing and presenting geographic information. GIS can be used to map patterns of crimes, incidents, accidents, services and resources where an accurate address is available. This easily allows spatial patterns of incidents to be observed and specific areas can be targeted. It can also be a useful presentational aid.

Box 3.8 Examples of using Geographical Information Systems

Falkirk Community Safety Partnership have used GIS to plot:

residential crime
fire service data
locations of Neighbourhood Watch schemes
home accidents

The partnership has recognised the benefits of GIS to allow efficient targeting of resources and the areas with the highest identified need, eg by mapping the location of Neighbourhood Watch schemes and residential crime it was possible to examine disparities between the location of the schemes and the location of high crime areas to identify areas where greatest effort should be spent in establishing new schemes.

The partnership discovered that one of the major problems to be overcome was the quality of data collection systems and the ease of converting this information into a usable format.

Midlothian Community Safety Partnership used GIS to map police recorded incidents of young people causing annoyance to help in targeting youth diversion activity.