The future of Recorded Crime and Police Activity Statistics

In October 2021, The Scottish Crime Recording Board sought your views on the future of Recorded Crime and Police Activity Statistics. This included inviting views on the production and dissemination of Scotland’s recorded crime statistics, and on the possible development of new statistical products covering other types of policing activity. The consultation ran from 22 October 2021 to 10 December 2021.

You provided us with 17 responses to our consultation questions. These included responses from 14 organisations and three individuals.

In summary, there was consensus among the respondents on:

• support for greater disaggregation of recorded crime statistics compared to the current approach
• continued support that common assault should be reclassified as a crime, and split into with and without injury;
• broadly content with the proposed definition of Common Assault with and without injury, with a few minor amendments suggested
• support for having commentary to contextualise the findings and in favour of Excel format tables to present the data within the National Statistics Annual bulletin
• support for comparisons being provided between findings from recorded crime and the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey, as well as information on cyber-crime within the National Statistics Annual bulletin
• support for reducing the frequency of the monthly statistics publications, suggesting quarterly releases would best suit their needs
• support for of the User Guide as a complementary document to the statistical bulletins
• generally supportive of the potential addition of demographic characteristics for those involved in crime
• support for the level of geographical disaggregation currently offered
• generally not supportive of the potential development of a Crime Severity Score
• support for the potential production of new statistics on non-criminal incidents recorded by Police Scotland
• interested in the potential value of these statistics to widen the understanding of police activity and inform policy and decision making

A report detailing a summary of all responses received was published on 24 March 2022 and is available at A consultation on the future of recorded crime and police activity statistics - Summary of responses and discussion of next steps

Responses to the consultation have now been published where permission has been obtained to do so and a report detailing a summary of all responses received has been published (see above).

The Scottish Crime Recording Board has considered the responses to this consultation, alongside feedback from both the previous consultation and other events run during the consultation period. Taking all this into account, the Scottish Crime Recording Board have approved a number of changes to the recorded crime statistics, including:

• the current set of crime and offence groups will be replaced with a new set based on Option A (as described in the consultation); the 2021-22 annual Recorded Crime in Scotland National Statistics will be the first to reflect this change
• common assault will be reclassified as a crime rather than an offence
• stalking will be reclassified as a crime rather than an offence
• common assault will be split into common assault with injury and common assault without injury, with the timing to be confirmed for the introduction of this change
• the annual Recorded Crime in Scotland National Statistics bulletin will be published in June, brought forward from September
• the annual Recorded Crime in Scotland National Statistics bulletin will be redesigned to ensure it meets accessibility requirements and statistical best practice
• the Recorded Crime Monthly Official Statistics will be discontinued following publication of the March 2022 bulletin in April 2022
• the Monthly Official Statistics will then be replaced with a quarterly release of National Statistics, which will present the latest rolling 12-month period

The 2021 consultation also asked for feedback on potential future developments for statistics on recorded crime and police activity. This evidence will be used to inform longer term planning of these statistics, and we will keep users informed of any developments via ScotStat.