Journey times in the Scottish Criminal Justice System: 2022 to 2023

6. Methods

A case may have multiple accused with multiple charges. For cases disposed of by COPFS, the journey time is taken to be the time between the oldest offence date and the date when the whole case was closed by COPFS.

Where COPFS decide that there should be no action against an accused, but action is taken against other accused in the same case, the case will remain open until all accused have reached a disposal.

Figures for accused given a direct measure cover those where the initial decision was to offer a direct measure. In some cases, the direct measure may have been refused and may not therefore have been the final disposal for the accused. Again, in a multi accused case, the case will not be closed until all accused have reached a disposal.

The same approach is used to calculate the times for accused disposed in court. The journey time is taken to be the time between the earliest offence date of the accused in a specific case and the latest verdict date (verdict date is only extracted when all charges have received a verdict). Time from offence to court registration is calculated using the date on which the accused was registered in SCTS. The supporting tables provide the median times for each chart with the addition of the 90^th percentile times added as an indicator of range.

It should be noted that throughout the document where a court type is referred to this indicates the destination or final court of the accused. Accused may move from one court type to another during their journey.

Where an accused is part of a multi-accused case, the case may be heard in a court type which appears inappropriate for one or more accused. For example, there are cases where an accused has only miscellaneous offence charges and they appear in a solemn court. In such situations, there may be a co-accused with more severe charges being tried in the same case.

To calculate journey times by crime group, all the charges present when an accused was registered with SCTS were mapped to a crime code. These crimes were then classified in groups defined in the new crime classification (Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2021-2022).

One of the primary aims of this new publication was to determine journey times for victims of sexual crime, therefore the methodology outlined below prioritises charges which relate to sexual crimes. Allocation of accused to a crime group follows the stepwise methodology outlined below:

1: if any of the charges against the accused is a sexual crime (Group 2) then that accused is included in the sexual crime group,

2: of the remaining (non-Group 2) accused, if any of their charges include a Group 1 crime, then they are classified in the non-sexual crimes of violence group (Group 1),

3: of the remaining accused, if any of their charges include a Group 3 crime, then they are classified in the crimes of dishonesty group (Group 3).

The same steps are followed for Damage and reckless behaviour (Group 4), Crimes against society (Group 5), Antisocial offences (Group 6), Miscellaneous offences (Group 7) and Road traffic offences (Group 8).

Note that each accused will be counted once for each case in which they appear and cannot appear in multiple crime groups, i.e. the journey time for an accused with a sexual crimes (group 2) charge at registration and a non-sexual crimes of violence (group 1) charge at registration will be included in the median journey time for sexual crimes and not for non-sexual crimes of violence.

In placing an accused in a single crime group using this methodology, there will always be a small number of occasions where the accused appears in a particular crime group that appears counterintuitive e.g. if an accused is charged with a minor sexual crime and serious assault, they will appear in the sexual crimes group when the serious assault charge may have more impact on their journey time.

Categories where the numbers of accused are small (<2 per month) have been removed from the charts and supplementary tables.

For each of the subsets of times under consideration, median times for 2021-22 (post COVID-19) are compared to 2019-20 (pre COVID-19) to help understand the effect that the pandemic has had on journey times. Further, figures for the year 2022-23 will be compared to the previous year (2021-22) to determine what change has occurred in the most recent period. A small number (<1%) of ‘historic’ charges with old offence dates are included in this analysis. Analysis of median times means that less weight is attributed to these long journey times and the addition of the 90th percentile time indicates the distribution of times. It is hoped that additional data fields can be added to this data set to allow specific analysis of ‘historic’ cases in the future.