FOI/201900000074 · FOI · released
Frequency/clear up rate for most frequently committed domestic abuse crimes: FOI release
Information requested
You asked for a table showing the frequency and clear up rate (%) for the five most frequently committed crimes and offences during a domestic abuse incident. This should be provided for 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18. Should the five most commonly committed crimes/offences vary from year to year, please use the five most common in 2017-18.
Response
I enclose a copy of the information you requested.
There are important caveats to be aware of when interpreting this information.
The first area to note is that this information is drawn from Police Scotland's Interim Vulnerable Persons Database (IVPD). The IVPD does not provide the official figure for crime clear up rates (which Police Scotland refer to as the ‘detection rate’). Should any crime or offence be committed during a domestic abuse incident – the police will record this on their Crime Management System, including whether it was cleared up. This system provides our official statistics on crime clear up rates. These statistics are published in the annual Recorded Crime statistics bulletin, including a breakdown of clear up rates by crime and offence type (see link below).
https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2017-18/pages/6/
The second area to note is that the information held by the Scottish Government does not provide an accurate representation of crimes and offences cleared up as part of a domestic abuse incident. Where an incident has multiple crimes/offences, only one of these needs to be cleared up for all of them to be marked as such within the data held by the Scottish Government. This is why this information is not included in the Official Statistics on Domestic Abuse Incidents Recorded by the Police (linked to below for information).
https://www.gov.scot/publications/domestic-abuse-recorded-police-scotland-2017-18/
Finally, it should also be noted that the clear up rate information provided in the tables below is not comparable across the three years requested. This is because the data these figures were derived from was extracted from the IVPD at different times during the year, prior to it being sent to the Scottish Government. The IVPD is an operational database which is continuously updated as investigations progress. All things being equal, the more time that elapses before data is extracted, the higher the suggested clear up rate will be, as officers have had more time to progress and update their enquiries. As noted above the official figures for crime clear up rates come from the annual Recorded Crime bulletin, based on data that is extracted from the Crime Management System at the same time each year.
Source: Domestic Abuse Dataset, IVPD
About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.