Scottish Crime Recording Standards Flashcards
What is the aims of SCRS?
To provide a victim orientated approach that serves the needs of our communities and ensures uniformity in crime recording standards throughout Scotland.
Principles of SCRS
1) All reports of incidents whether crime related or not, will result in the creation of a report which is auditable.
2) Following initial registration, an incident will be recorded as a crime in all cases if:
• circumstances amount to a crime defined by Scots Law or an offence under statute and
• there is no credible evidence to the contrary
3) once recorded, a crime will remain recorded there is credible evidence to disprove that a crime has occurred
Principle 1 of SCRS
All incidents reported to police must be recorded on an auditable system. This includes “just for information” reports and all those things which we take notes about or out into briefing registers.
This info is valuable for community intelligence. We cannot analyse information unless it is recorded on a computerised database.
Principe 2 SCRS.
2 parts
• Although SCRS is more victim orientated we can only take crimes and offences defined by Scot’s law. If it doesn’t fit into a common law definition or a statutory offence it is not a crime.
• “no credible evidence to the contrary”
A crime should be recorded as soon as the investigating officer is satisfied that it is more likely than not that a crime has been committed.
Principe 3 SCRS
“Once recorded, a crime will remain recorded unless there is credible evidence to disprove that a crime had occurred”
Crime Managment can update things “no crime”, before they do this you have disprove a crime has occurred on the CR.
What do you do when someone reports criminal activity but doesn’t engage?
Where apparent criminal activity comes to the attention of police and the alerted victim declines to support any police action, a crime report should be recorded. So in instances where someone has been assaulted but advises they do not wish to make a complaint, a CR should be submitted.
We may be unable to investigate some of these crimes, but an appropriate update on the crime reports will justify limited or no investigation.
CRs must be recorded as soon as reasonably practicable and the expectation is that this would be within a period of 72 hours from the time of the incident was first notified to police.
Where you locate an apparent victim but they decline to confirm they have been a victim, further reasonable enquiries should be made to establish if a crime had been committed. If there is supporting evidence that on the balance of probabilities a crime has occurred a crime report must be submitted.
IN ANY EVENT - incident must be updated with either the CR number or contain sufficient information to dispel criminality.
Powers of discretion.
The SCRS does not remove police power of discretion with dealing with instances of anti social behaviour, minor acts of disorder or minor road traffic violations.
When officers come across acts of minor disturbance and the offenders desist when warned there is no need to raise a crime report.
Under SCRS when “self generated” work leads to the detection of offenders E.g. road traffic cases, it is not necessary to raise a storm incident. But there may be occasions you wish to do so for officer safety reasons.
What is a crime related incident?
“Any incident relating to a criminal offence or one in which any criminal offence may have been committed”
What are the types of incident call types?
See camera role for photo.
NB sometimes call types have to be amended after you go to a job.
ACR will do this.
What is a disposable code and what are the SCRS disposal codes (4)
They describe how an incident has been disposed of. Up to 6 disposal codes can be applied to an incident, one of which must be a SCRS disposal code.
SC01 - Crime Report
SC02 - No crime report
SC04 - See linked incident
SC05 - Transferred to other force
NB Disposal codes are important, but always add text to the Job to provide an overview of the outcome.
