Homicide in Scotland 2023-24

Data and Methodology

How to access background or source data

The data collected for this statistical bulletin:

☐ are available in more detail through statistics.gov.scot.

☒ some limited additional information may be made available on request, subject to consideration of legal and ethical factors. Please contact statistics.enquiries@gov.scot for further information.

☐ detailed information cannot be made available by Scottish Government for further analysis as Scottish Government is not the data controller.

Data Sources

Police Scotland maintain a continuously updated list of homicide cases that the Scottish Government uses to populate its own database of homicides in Scotland. The statistics presented in this bulletin are based on a snapshot of Police Scotland’s live homicide database at an agreed date.

In this bulletin homicide cases are included against the year in which the crime that led to the homicide is first recorded by the police. This is not necessarily the year in which the victim dies (and hence is recorded as a homicide), the year in which the accused is brought to trial for the crime, or the year in which the case is finally disposed of by the courts.

Quality Assurance

The data provided by Police Scotland go through a series of validation checks, whereby any queries raised through this quality assurance process are fed back to Police Scotland for consideration and discussion. It should be noted that homicides are very high-profile crimes, and – in many instances – discussed openly in public. Both Scottish Government statisticians and homicide specialists within Police Scotland consider it unlikely that any major errors exist (as opposed to our practice outlined below for making revisions).

Since it is a ‘live’ system, amendments to Police Scotland’s database can arise after the data has been submitted to the Scottish Government (for example, a serious assault may be reclassified to a culpable homicide sometime after the crime was first recorded by the police). To allow for these changes, we make retrospective revisions to earlier data for all years since the formation of Police Scotland (i.e. 2013-14 onwards). There was one such case this time, where an attempted murder recorded in 2019-20 was reclassified as murder in 2023-24. As such, the total number of homicide cases published in last year’s bulletin has been revised upwards from 65 to 66 for 2019-20. Earlier revisions are detailed in previous editions of this publication available at Homicide in Scotland statistics - gov.scot.

As Accredited Official Statistics, this information on homicide in Scotland is subject to continuous review by analysts to ensure it remains of high value for users. When producing the 2017-18 statistics, we identified that there is a tendency for the first publication of figures for a particular year to be revised upwards in subsequent bulletins - due to developments with specific cases. As outlined above, an example of this could be where a victim of serious assault dies of their injuries sometime after the incident, which could subsequently lead to the case being reclassified to a culpable homicide. Decisions at the prosecution stage can also have an impact, leading to some crimes being reclassified to homicides.

Given this, we made a small amendment to the data collection process for these statistics in 2017-18. As with earlier bulletins, we continue to present statistics based on a snapshot of Police Scotland’s live homicide database as at the end of the reporting year. However, in addition to this, we now carry out a further check during the month before publication – whereby any crimes recorded during previous reporting years but not reclassified to a homicide until after the current reporting year, can now be included in the first publication of that year’s statistics – and not as a subsequent revision. There were no such cases in 2023-24.

This change further improves the quality of these statistics as it reduces the need for subsequent revisions to the data, though clearly they can still occur should crimes be reclassified to a homicide after the additional check has been carried out.

In addition to the above consideration of our revisions policy, we also previously discussed with Police Scotland the increase in homicide cases with a drug-related motive from 2016-17 onwards. Police Scotland advise that this may be due at least in part to an improvement in recording practice (i.e. better identification of where motives can include a drug-related element). Given this, users are advised to exercise some caution when comparing this variable with years prior to 2016-17.