[Essay Help]: SSC124 Patterns And Trends In Crime And Victimisation

SSC124 Patterns And Trends In Crime And Victimisation.

In the manual return, police forces submit both the total number of hate crime offences (that is a count of the number of unique offences motivated by one or more of the five monitored strands) and the monitored strands (or motivating factors) associated with these offences. From 2015/16, police forces who returned data manually were required to provide an offence group breakdown for recorded hate crimes; prior to 2015/16 only an aggregated total of hate crimes for each of the five strands was asked for. It is possible for more than one of the monitored strands (motivating factors) to be assigned to a crime. For example, an offence could be motivated by hostility to race and religion, so would be counted under both strands but would only constitute one offence. Further information on how the police record hate crime can be found in the Hate Crime Operational Guidance27 publication.

At the end of each financial year, the Home Office carry out a series of quality assurance checks on the hate crime data collected from the police forces (either by aggregate return or via the HODH).

These checks include:

• Looking for any large or unusual changes in hate crimes from the previous year.
• Looking for outliers.
• Checking that the total number of hate crimes is higher than the total number of offences. Where these two figures were the same, the force was asked to confirm they were recording multiple hate crime strands.

Within the Ministry of Justice’s statistical publications there can be three main reasons for statistics to be revised:

• Changes in how either source administrative systems collect information or a change in statistical methodology to improve accuracy and measurement.
• Receipt of subsequent information which alters our understanding of previous periods (for example – late recording on one of the administrative IT systems used operationally).
• Errors in our statistical systems and processes.  Our policy in handling revisions is to be transparent with users about:
• The need for revisions.
• How and when to expect revisions as part of our standard processes.
• The processes by which other revisions will be communicated and published. To meet these commitments, all of our statistical publications will:
• Ensure that the need for major revisions for any series are pre-announced on the Ministry of Justice website.
• Include a detailed revisions policy within every release.
• Detail how users will be informed of the need for revisions.
• Give detailed and full explanations as to why the revisions were necessary. In addition, the annual report from the Head of Profession to the National Statistician will:
• Provide information on how many revisions were required to our publications and the reasons for these.
• Publish a time-series of revisions due to errors in our statistical processes and procedures so we can monitor the quality of our outputs.

SSC124 Patterns And Trends In Crime And Victimisation