Question reference: S6W-06156
- Asked by: Jamie Greene, MSP for West Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 24 February 2022
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Current status: Answered by Keith Brown on 9 March 2022
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many recorded offences of (a) actual and (b) attempted (i) theft from a motor vehicle by opening a lockfast place, (ii) theft of a motor vehicle, (iii) theft by opening a lockfast place, (iv) theft by housebreaking, including housebreaking "with intent", and (v) house burglary there have been in each of the last 10 years, and, of these, (A) how many and (B) what percentage (1) were reported by the public, (2) were subsequently investigated by police, (3) led to charges being brought and (4) resulted in a successful prosecution.
Answer
As this requires several tables of data to answer, a response has been provided through the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 63198). Across all crime and justice-related statistics, house burglary is not identified separately from housebreaking. As such each table shows actual and attempted crimes for theft from a motor vehicle by opening a lockfast place, theft of a motor vehicle, theft by opening a lockfast place and theft by housebreaking, including housebreaking ‘with intent’.
Table 1 shows crimes recorded by the police between 2011-12 and 2020-21. We do not hold information on the number or percentage of these crimes that were reported to the police by the public. For information the Scottish Crime & Justice Survey includes estimates of how many property crimes were committed over 2008-09 to 2019-20, and the percentage of them that were reported to the police. Further information on this has been provided alongside the tables. All crimes presented in Table 1 will have been investigated by the police as a crime was recorded by them. Table 2 and Table 3 show the number and percentage of these crime types that were cleared up the police.
Table 4 shows charges brought by Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.
Tables 5 and 6 show the number of people proceeded against and the number of people convicted respectively, for these crime types over 2009-10 to 2019-20, and the overall percentage is shown in table 7. The 2020-21 National Statistics will be published later this year.
Care should be taken when comparing different data sources relating to the criminal justice system. For example recorded crime statistics count crimes and offences at the time that they came to the attention of Police Scotland while criminal proceedings statistics report on cases which have concluded in court. This means that a crime may be recorded by the police in one year, charges brought and court proceedings concluded in subsequent years. In addition, a person may be proceeded against for more than one crime, or a set of crimes with more than one victim, in a proceeding, but only the main charge is counted in these court proceedings statistics. There is also the possibility that the crime recorded by the police may be altered in the course of judicial proceedings.