Charges reported under the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012 in 2014-15

2. Methods

For this research, an analyst from the Scottish Government undertook a review of cases files from the COPFS case management database. This database contains the information that is submitted to COPFS by the police after the accused are charged, including a description of the incident, information about the progression of the charge through the criminal justice system, the decisions that were made on whether or not to prosecute, the court's verdict, and any penalties issued by the court after a conviction. Since this is a live database, information can be updated and changed during the life of the case. For instance if the Procurator Fiscal amends a charge, the database only holds details of the amended charged.

The COPFS case management database is not designed for routine analysis but an extracted dataset has been used as the source for this research project to explore charges made under the Act.

There are a number of points that should be kept in mind when reading this report. First, this analysis is based on data that was reported to COPFS by the police and is therefore limited by what was included in their reports. Any analysis of, for example, the nature of the offensive behaviour and/or the links to drugs and alcohol depend on the extent to which this information is provided in the reports. This information may not have always been recorded by the police, for example where it was not viewed as directly relevant to the charge.

Second, this report does not present information about the real or actual personal, social, or cultural backgrounds of victims that may have been the focus of an attack. The report does not include information, for example, about the religious affiliation, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation of victims. This is because the characteristics of the victim are not relevant to an assessment of whether a crime was committed and therefore are not required to be recorded in police prosecution reports.

Finally, the analysis of charges included cases which are still underway and the findings may therefore be incomplete on some of the questions.