Criminal Proceedings in Scotland 2012-13

Notes on Statistics Used in this Bulletin

Annex A - Data Sources

Court proceedings, Police disposals and COPFS disposals

A.1 Statistical information in the Scottish Government Criminal Proceedings database is derived from data held on the Criminal History System (CHS). The CHS is maintained by Police Scotland who own the majority of the data on the system.

Bail and undertakings

A.2 The source of the statistical data on bail orders and undertakings is also the CHS. Police Scotland 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 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

A.3 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.

A.4 The population figures used as denominators in Table 5 are the relevant mid-year estimates prepared by the National Records of Scotland (NRS).