Retained Crime Statistics 1996 – 2002
Date of request: 16 March 2024
Reference: 440-24
Request
Crime data by crime categories by local policing area prior to 2003 to the furthest you can retrieve data back.
Clarification received 28/03/2024:
By ‘crime data’, which I should have specified, my apologies, I mean total crime recorded and homicides. How far does your data go back do you know? If it is possible as you have said in your example, is it possible to get this back to cover 1992 to 2002.
Please let me know if this would go over your time and budget limits, I am happy to limit the time period to 1996 to 2002 for instance.
Response
Information for this timeframe is held by district. In the first instance we have provided information from 1996 to 2002. The earliest year for which data is held is 1946. However, as explained in our email of 27th March, we estimate that it would not be possible to provide complete information since that date within the appropriate limit, due to the number of files held. If additional years are required as part of a further request, it would be possible to cover a similar timeframe to that which we have provided here.
Please find attached CSV files showing total retained crimes, including homicide, broken down by crime type and district for 1996 – 2002. Districts are labelled by letter. Below you will see a key indicating what each letter represents for the relevant timeframe.
The information has not been recorded in the same way for every district and year. You will see that in some cases, both the Home Office (HO) offence code and offence description are listed, while in other cases only one or other is shown.
For District G in 2002, the data recorded on our central list of retained crimes does not list either the offence code or description. It does list the crime reference numbers under which crimes have been scanned into our electronic database. From this, it would be possible for us to identify the offence involved. However, each individual electronic file would have to be reviewed to retrieve this data. With more than 400 retained crimes scanned in this way for District G in 2002, we estimate it would take in excess of 18 hours to manually retrieve this information. This would attract a refusal under Section 12(1) relating to costs. We have instead sought to provide you with the recorded information that is retrievable within the appropriate limit under Section 12.
Information is held separately for Districts B and C, for years 1997 – 1999. This data can be found within the attachment labelled ‘Districts B and C – 1997 – 1999’. The reason this information is held separately is due to discrepancies previously identified in relation to the data held. While we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the Offence Codes recorded for these districts and years, we have identified that some incidents may have been recorded more than once. In some cases the occurrences shown on this attachment may therefore be duplicates.
District labels by year: [see ‘Historical Districts’ within supporting documents]
The data provided is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system covering these timeframes. Care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.