Recorded Crimes and Offences Involving Firearms, Scotland, 2020-21 and 2021-22

Annex 3: Review of data process for these Official Statistics

During quality assurance of the information collected for the 2016-17 official statistics, Scottish Government statisticians and analysts from Police Scotland noted there was a higher risk in some divisions that the data collection process being used may not have identified all relevant offences involving a firearm. Following discussion a decision was taken to postpone the release of the 2016-17 figures until further checks could be carried out. Users were informed of this through the SCOTSTAT network in January 2018.

Scottish Government statisticians then worked with Police Scotland to review the approaches being taken across their 13 divisions, to identify any additional offences that needed to be included in the data. This review suggested that (i) some divisions undertook very thorough checks, which ensured they were well equipped at identifying offences that involved a firearm and (ii) the consistent application of a check based on a key-word search (outlined above as step three) would help ensure all divisions were in this position. Based on these findings, refreshed guidance on how to collate this data was issued to divisions, who were asked to resubmit their returns for 2015-16 and 2016-17, along with new data for 2017-18.

The resulting statistics were then published in April 2019. A bulletin presenting new information for 2018-19 and 2019-20 on the same methodology was published in June 2022. This bulletin provides new information for the reporting years of 2020-21 and 2021-22, on the same improved methodology as 2015-16 to 2019-20.

Given the improvement to the data collection process, users are advised to be cautious when making comparisons between data published up to 2014-15 and the data published in this bulletin for 2015-16 onwards. As the earlier data has not been revisited, a direct comparison of this nature is unlikely to be on a like-for-like basis.