Chapter Two: Methodology
2.1 An initial scoping exercise was undertaken to determine the information available from COPFS. The COPFS Case Management Database is a live, operational database used to manage the processing of reports submitted to Procurators Fiscal by the police and other reporting agencies. It is a national database for the entire Service and contains two types of information about cases reported to the Procurator Fiscal: a copy of the initial report to the Procurator Fiscal and electronic data relating to the accused and the charges against the accused. As the case is processed, additional data about witnesses, court dates and the results for each charge as well as important case documents will be added to the database. The Procurator Fiscal will often make changes to the initial charges reported by the police and these changes are reflected in the electronic case data although details of the original charge as it was reported are not retained in the database and the text of the police report remains in its original format. It is therefore possible, when comparing police reports with the case data, to find a closed case in which the charges contained in the initial report are different from the charges, for which the accused was convicted, as recorded in the database. For example, an initial report may include a charge of religiously aggravated assault but the database shows that the accused was later convicted of breach of the peace with no religious aggravation. These considerations mean that great care must be taken when interpreting data from the database and that it is not always possible to obtain statistical information in a way that would be possible from a statistical database. In addition, much of the contextual information about the nature of the religious aggravation is available in the text of the police report but is not held as data in the database. This meant that the police reports were used as the primary source of contextual information about the religious aggravation and follow up queries about the progress of the case were answered using the case data.
2.2 As police reports to COPFS are used as the main data source for this study, the figures presented in this report cover only the incidents where a religious aggravation was reported by the police to the COPFS.
2.3 It should be noted that not all incidents of religious aggravation come to the attention of the police and it is therefore not possible to draw conclusions on the total amount of incidents with religious aggravation. This report should, therefore, not be used to determine the level of religiously aggravated incidents in Scotland or to compare the level of such incidents between different areas of Scotland.
2.4 The COPFS database was used to identify case numbers involving a religiously aggravated charge from 1 st January 2004 to 30 th June 2005 and provide information on the proceedings of such charges through the court system. The police reports relating to these case numbers were then retrieved electronically from the database and analysed.
2.5 There is a standard format for all reports provided to the Procurator Fiscal, the Standard Prosecution Report ( SPR), but it is a general format that is applicable to all offences reported by all reporting agencies and it therefore has limited scope to standardise the collection or presentation of information perceived as impacting on religious prejudice, (e.g. the role of alcohol, football or marches). Consequently, the richness and robustness of the information is variable both within and across police forces. This lack of reliability in the data necessitates that a great deal of caution should be employed when interpreting figures in this report.
2.6 The primary information contained in the police reports to COPFS and the electronic data which tracks cases through the justice system is essentially the same. However, as police reports count cases and the electronic data counts accused and charges, there are some practical difficulties in associating information from these two sources. In order to address these practical difficulties, it was decided to track cases that involved one accused and one charge.
2.7 The cases that fulfilled this criteria (one accused with one charge) were followed through the court process allowing for contextual information (derived from the police reports) to be associated with information on the progress of these cases.
2.8 For analytical purposes, the 18 month period being reviewed was divided into 3 separate six months periods: 1 st January to 26 th June 2004; 27 th June to 31 st December 2004; and 1 st January to 26 th June 2005 2. This enables the same period to be considered when updating and comparing figures with those published by COPFS ( COPFS, 2005).