Recorded Crime in Scotland: May 2020

Crimes recorded under coronavirus legislation

It is important to note that these Official Statistics currently exclude crimes recorded under the Coronavirus Act 2020 and Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (Scotland) Regulations 2020. These were implemented on 25th March and 27th March respectively and resulted in new crimes being recorded - for example where someone, who had left the place they were living, did not have a reasonable excuse for this when asked by a police officer, and failed to comply with police advice or instruction to return there.

Given the rapid pace of these changes, Police Scotland have used an interim and bespoke data collection to capture information on the number of new crimes recorded under the coronavirus legislation. This is why figures for this legislation are currently presented separately to the overall totals provided for recorded crime in this bulletin. The bespoke data collection suggests that approximately 2,700 such crimes were recorded during April 2020 and 1,700 in May 2020. Users should treat these figures as broadly indicative, and may be subject to further revision in future releases. Police Scotland are currently reviewing the systems and methodologies they use to capture this data, with the aim of incorporating it into the wider administrative system used to produce Scotland's crime statistics. We will inform users of progress in this area through subsequent editions of these monthly Official Statistics (and in due course the annual National Statistics).