Drug seizures and offender characteristics: 2014-2015 and 2015-2016

Annex: Data Quality Statement

• To produce this annual release on drug seizures, the Scottish Government requests data on drug supply-related crimes from Police Scotland's Analysis and Performance Unit ( APU). APU, in turn, requests this information from divisions across Police Scotland which still maintain aspects of their own Crime Management Systems defined by the previous legacy force areas. It was not possible to get data from every record for the two years presented in this bulletin. Edinburgh and the Lothians & Scottish Borders divisions were unable to extract data for 2014-15 and provided a partial return for 2015-16. As such the figures provided for drug supply crime relate to an estimated 85% and 92% of drug supply-related crimes in 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively. It is anticipated that all areas will provide a full return from 2016-17 onwards.
• In addition to this, data from drug possession crimes is collected via a random sample of 400 drug possession crime records per year. This sample is stratified by police division so that the sample's geographic distribution reflects the distribution of drug possession crimes across Scotland. These records are reviewed by Scottish Government statisticians.
• As part of the sampling process, the quality of the recording of drug possession crimes was checked and found to be very good, with nearly 100% of records classified correctly across 2014-15 and 2015-16.
• We always welcome feedback on the content of our statistical bulletins and users are welcome to submit their comments to: JusticeAnalysts@gov.scot.