One in seven sexual crimes filed wrongly by officers
ONE in every seven sex crimes in Scotland was wrongly recorded in official figures, a police watchdog has warned.
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) said the accuracy of the statistics was worsening.
Its audit showed some incidents had not been logged as crimes, raising doubt over the credibility of the data.
Overall, 9.2 per cent of crimes had been miscounted or mis-categorised, according to a study of 7,177 incidents between January and March 2020.
Scottish Tory justice spokesman Liam Kerr said: ‘The scale of the problem revealed here is extremely worrying. This is damaging and distressing to victims of serious crimes, but it also betrays the hard work police officers do trying to bring criminals to justice.
‘I hope the SNP Government takes note of this report.’
The report said ‘standards of recording sexual and violent crime in some of the areas assessed had dropped’.
On sexual incidents, ‘only 86.1 per cent were counted and classified correctly, lower than 2016 [91.4 per cent]’ – meaning about one in seven were miscounted or mis-categorised.
Only 80.1 per cent were recorded within 72 hours of being reported to police, compared with 83.9 per cent in 2016.
HMICS said that in relation to reports of rape or serious sexual harm, it had ‘examined incidents where an initial briefing report [outlining the incident] had been completed and where it appeared there was sufficient information provided to create a crime record yet no crime record existed’.
The watchdog examined 2,099 violent incidents, 1,046 of which resulted in a crime record. Of these, 91.1 per cent were counted and classified correctly, a decrease from the results found in 2016 [96 per cent].
In her report, Gill Imery, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland, praised the work of
Police Scotland’s regional crime registrars and highlighted examples of good practice.
She said they ‘go right to the heart of public confidence and it is essential crimes are recorded accurately and ethically’.
Mrs Imery said: ‘The public use the data to determine if their local area is safe and if crime is decreasing or increasing. The police use them to monitor trends and variations, enabling them to ensure that resources are deployed appropriately.’
She said it was ‘disappointing to find wide variations in compliance with recording standards at a local level’, adding: ‘Progress towards standardisation may be limited until there is a national crime management system.
‘One area in which Police Scotland consistently performs well is in the documenting of domestic abuse incidents and this reflects the investment which has been put into training and understanding of domestic abuse. It is important therefore that learning from this area is considered when new legislation or improvements to practice are introduced.’
HMICS’s advice included better training to provide ‘consistent crime recording’.
Assistant Chief Constable Judi Heaton said: ‘This inspection took place against the backdrop of a global pandemic which brought unprecedented challenges as we worked to keep our communities, staff and officers safe.
‘We are committed to ensuring that our crime recording meets our high standard of completion and accuracy, and we will continue to seek improvement in the small number of areas identified by HMICS.’
‘Extremely worrying’