Criminal Proceedings in Scotland 2011-12

Annex A - Data Sources

Court proceedings, Police disposals and COPFS disposals

A1. Statistical information in the Scottish Government Criminal Proceedings Database is derived from data held on the Criminal History System (CHS) at the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA). The CHS is maintained by SPSA on behalf of the eight Scottish police forces who own the majority of the data on the system.

Bail and undertakings

A2. The source of the statistical data on bail orders and undertakings is also the SPSA CHS. SPSA create a statistical extract each day, which picks up records of any bail orders or undertakings granted three days before, which are still associated with live pending cases on the SPSA database. For example, the extract run at the start of a Thursday will pick up any bail orders or undertakings granted on the Monday of that week which a) have been recorded on the database by the start of Thursday, and b) which are associated with pending cases still live at the start of Thursday.

Other

A3. Chart 2 uses a range of summary data collected from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Scottish Government Recorded Crime data and information on police conditional offers made for motor vehicle offences, based on figures provided by police force traffic departments, and information derived from CHS.

A4. The population figures used as denominators in Table 5 are the relevant mid-year estimates prepared by the National Records of Scotland (NRS).