Ethnicity in the Justice System

Errata

An errata was published on 12/07/2024 – due to a coding error the ethnicity of a small number of respondents to the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey were incorrectly categorized in the previously published data. This affected 123 respondents out of the total sample of 90,713. The corrected ethnic composition of the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey sample is in Table 1.2 on page 13. The key findings from this updated analysis remain unchanged. However, in this updated analysis there are 25 instances where the outcome of a significance test has changed. This is out of a total of 785 significance tests that were conducted. In 9 out of the 25 the result became insignificant where it was previously significant, and in the other 16 the result went from not significant to significant. 9 tables in Appendix C have been updated to show the corrected sample sizes for the ethnic groups affected. One further correction has been made to an error in the workforce data table in Appendix C for the proportion of police officers whose ethnicity is unknown. The publication has also been updated to include data from Scotland’s Census 2022 on ethnic group. The HTML and PDF have been updated to reflect these changes. Changes have been made on PDF pages 4, 5, 7, 9-36, 41, 42, 57-59, 64, 65, 71, 74-79, 81-84, 87-89.

Contents

Executive Summary

1. Introduction

2. Perceptions of crime, safety, the police and the justice system

3. Experiences of crime

4. Patterns of offending and the justice system response

5. Justice Workforce

Appendix A: Further information on data sources

Appendix B: Methodology for Scottish Crime and Justice Survey pooled sample analysis

Appendix C: Additional data tables