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About these statistics

The force produces a range of statistical information including crime statistics which are shared with the Home Office, our Police Authority, local councils, Crime and Disorder Partnerships and other public bodies. In addition data is published by the Chief Constable in Annual Reports.

Crime statistics are taken from a live database that is being continually updated, so the force operates certain protocols to make sure that published data can be authenticated against set criteria for data quality and so that a count of crime for any time range at, for example, force level could be divided into the different Basic Command Unit (BCU) or Local Policing Unit (LPU) equivalent statistics.

The performance year for the police service runs from April 1 to March 31 and thus statistics are reported on a "year to date" basis (i.e. from April 1 to the end of the latest month in question).

Sometimes a crime is not reported to the police in the month in which the offence took place. Likewise, sometimes a crime that appeared to fit one category is, on subsequent investigation, shown to be a more serious (or lesser) crime.

For example, what was first thought to be criminal damage may prove to need to be upgraded to an attempted burglary. Finally, it is also possible that an earlier report of a crime may subsequently be found to be a genuine mistake and needs to be taken out of the official crime statistics for that year. This latter process results in a record becoming 'no–crimed'.

By following standard national protocols to deal with these situations described above, it is possible that counts of crimes previously published may become out of date in the light of changing information as it comes to our attention.

Standard convention within the police service is that all such adjustments are swept up in the next available month's "year to date" statistics. Therefore, although monthly data is also published (as well as year to date data), users should note that the monthly crime count published on the force website will include adjustments for:

  • any crimes reported late for an earlier time period;
  • any adjustments for the reclassification of a previously reported crime; and
  • the subsequent ‘no criming’ of any record which was counted within crime statistics for a previous month.