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Criminal Proceedings in Scottish Courts, 1999

Annex Notes on Statistics Used in this Bulletin

Data sources

1. Since 1988, statistical information on court proceedings in respect of all crimes and some offences has been derived from data held on the police operational computer at the Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO). Details of prosecutions for most motor vehicle offences and minor statutory and common law offences are sent by the police on monthly statistical returns to the Scottish Executive. The SCRO data are not designed for statistical purposes, and some resulting limitations of the statistics are described in Notes 2 to 6 below.

2. The police constantly update the SCRO database using information they receive from court sheets on the outcome of any court proceedings. Occasionally there will be a pending case on SCRO which is not updated until some time after the case has been disposed of. This means that this bulletin contains details of court proceedings as currently recorded by the police, and that figures are subject to revision.

3. Some inconsistencies in the data cannot currently be corrected. The main examples are persons whose gender has not been recorded or whose age is unknown. Some persons aged less than 16 have been recorded as receiving community service orders. This is due to the age returned from SCRO being based on the original date of birth that SCRO recorded for an accused. This date of birth may well differ from the date of birth recorded on the court sheet.

4. The police record very detailed information on statutory offences but this does not always correspond exactly to the categories in the SEJD 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 SEJD classification divides this into 3 categories - resisting arrest, serious assault and simple assault, but this distinction is not made by the courts. The majority of such cases are thought to have been classed as simple assault, and all the offences under this subsection have been so classified. It is estimated that this reduces the figures of resisting arrest (which is counted as a crime against public justice in the "other crimes" category) by some 1,700 for Scotland.

5. The same problem arises in relation to a number of other statutes but at the level of aggregation used in the bulletin there is often no change to the final category. The numbers involved in cases where there is a change in the final category are thought to be very small.

6. Information on prosecutions originating from sources other than the police were not provided by Grampian Police in 1990 or 1991. The shortfall has reduced the number of prosecutions for Group 6 offences (mainly Wireless Telegraphy Act cases), most of which would have resulted in fines.

Method of analysis

7. The unit of analysis used in this bulletin - except in section 10 - is the person or company proceeded against. Persons are counted once for each occasion on which they are proceeded against. If more than one proceeding is disposed of on the same day each occasion will be counted separately. The statistics are therefore not directly comparable with statistics on direct sentenced receptions to penal establishments (see note 10) or with social work authorities' statistics on community service orders. Companies constitute less than 1 per cent of the total and references to "persons" include companies, unless otherwise stated.

8. Where a person is proceeded against for more than one crime or offence, only the main charge is counted. The main charge is the one receiving the severest penalty if one or more charges are proved. If more than one charge receives the same (or a combined) penalty, then the main charge is the one judged by the police (who provide the information) to be the most serious. If no charge is proved then the one reaching the furthest stage in proceedings is the main one. A person with a charge proved is defined to be one who had a plea of "guilty" accepted, or who was proved guilty of at least one charge as a result of a trial. Generally only the initial outcome is included in the court proceedings statistics, so that, for example, a person fined is regarded as fined even if he or she subsequently goes to prison in default of payment. (The exception to this recording policy is that proceedings for breach of community service, probation, etc. are included in Crime Group 6 — miscellaneous offences.) Similarly, where possible, no account is taken of the outcome of appeals; the exception being for those crimes where an appeal is determined prior to publication and the conviction is quashed. Interim decisions such as deferral of sentence are also excluded.

9. The year recorded for each person in the statistics is the year in which the person's case is disposed of. So if a person pleads to and is convicted for a charge in 1998 but is not sentenced until 1999 all events are recorded as occurring in 1999. The age of each person is calculated as the age at the time that sentence was passed.

10. Figures for custodial sentences do not agree with those published in the statistical bulletin "Prisons Statistics Scotland" because the figures presented here count sentences of courts while those in the prisons statistical bulletin count receptions to penal establishments. Direct sentenced receptions to penal establishments (i.e. excluding fine defaulters) are counted differently from custodial disposals in the court proceedings statistics for 2 main reasons. Firstly, in the case of backdated sentences if, after backdating, it is found that the custodial sentence has expired, neither the warrant nor the person sentenced will be taken to prison and thus a reception will not be counted though the sentence will be included in the court statistics. Secondly, if a person is given one or more custodial sentences on each of 2 separate sets of charges from the same court on the same day, this will be counted as 2 custodial sentences in the court statistics but only one direct sentenced reception.

11. Figures for sentence lengths imposed include any element imposed for bail aggravation under Section 27(1)(b) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 (where the offender was on a bail order issued after 31 March 1996 at the time the offence was committed), and sentences imposed under Section 16 of the Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993 (where the offender committed an offence following release from custody and prior to the end of the previous sentence period imposed). Compared with previous bulletins in this series, the sentence length categories used in Table 11 have been adjusted so that sentences of exactly 4 years — 1461 days — are now included in the category "4 years or over"; in previous bulletins such sentences were included in the category "Over 2 years to 4 years". The number of convictions resulting in a custodial sentence of exactly 4 years in 1990 to 1999 were, respectively, 92, 88, 98, 127, 136, 80, 105, 114, 116, 106 and 127.)

12. The number of prosecutions for motor vehicle offences (chiefly speeding and vehicle defect offences) has been affected by the introduction of 3 alternatives to prosecutions: the conditional offer of a fixed penalty to the accused by the procurator fiscal (introduced on 1 July 1983); the vehicle defect rectification scheme whereby offenders may sometimes avoid prosecution if they restore their vehicle to road worthiness (introduced on 1 May 1984); and the conditional offer of a fixed penalty to the accused by the police (introduced on 1 April 1993). Prosecutions for some minor offences other than motor vehicle offences have also been affected by the introduction of a fixed penalty scheme introduced on 1 January 1988. Over 80 per cent of police conditional offers are paid; most of the remainder are reported to the Procurator Fiscal.

Reoffending on bail

13. The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1995 led to a change in the way in which offending while on bail is treated in the court proceedings statistics. Offenders convicted of offending while subject to a bail order issued prior to 1 April 1996 will, if the main result related to the bail offence, have been classified to the main offence category "crimes against public justice". Where the bail order was issued after 1 April 1996, the main offence will be the offence committed while on bail as the aggravation applies to that offence and is not now separately categorised. Due to lags in the system, the figures for 1999 include a small number of cases involving a charge proved under the old bail regime. While there is no change to the total number of persons with a charge proved, the effect of the 1995 legislation was to decrease the number of persons with a main offence classified in the "crimes against public justice" category with consequent rises in the figures for other categories.

Penalties available to the courts

14. The measures available to a court in sentencing a person with a charge proved depend on whether the accused is an adult (21 or over), a young offender (aged 16 but less than 21) or a child (under 16 or under 18 with a current supervisory requirement from a children's hearing) and on whether the court is satisfied on the evidence of 2 medical practitioners that he is suffering from mental disorder. The measures available in 1999 included:

*References in this bulletin to "convictions" should be taken to include all persons with a charge proved, ie including these instances where no conviction is recorded in summary procedure.

15. The court can impose more than one penalty in appropriate cases. For example, a fine (752 cases in 1999) or an order to find caution (10 cases in 1999) can be imposed in addition to a more severe penalty. Equipment used in the commission of a crime or offence may also be forfeited. However, the main additional punishments are generally disqualification from holding or obtaining a driving licence and the endorsement of a driving licence. The main charge in such cases is almost always either a motor vehicle offence or the theft of a motor vehicle.

Classification of Crimes and Offences

16. Contraventions of the law are divided for statistical purposes into crimes and offences, crimes generally being the more serious. The classification of crimes and offences used by the Scottish Executive Justice Department for criminal statistics contains about 320 codes. These are grouped in this bulletin as follows.

17. This bulletin presents only a selection of the statistics available from the SEJD court proceedings database. Further information on the range of additional analysis available can be obtained by contacting the enquiry point given at the end of this bulletin.

The following symbols are used throughout the tables in this bulletin:

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