The Crown Prosecution Service response to the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism

Annex A: Methods - Response to recommendation 8

Aim

1. The analysis aimed to detail the progress of antisemitic incidents initially reported to the police through to charge and then, ultimately, to their respective prosecution outcomes.

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General approach

2. Prior to April 2007, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was not able to identify racially or religiously aggravated cases that were antisemitic from its electronic files.
3. Therefore, the CPS obtained from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) a dataset on antisemitic incidents reported to these forces in 2006/07 (01/04/2006 to 31/03/2007). Unique reference numbers (URNs) were used to identify relevant cases on the CPS Case Management System (CMS) - a national computer network established at the end of 2001. This facilitated additional data collection from CPS case files on charged cases.
4. Following a Hate Crime Monitoring Project which sought to improve the electronic recording of hate crime, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) agreed to include categories of religion or belief on the Manual of Guidance (MG) case file forms. As a result, the religion or belief of all defendants and victims is now recorded on the CPS Case Management System (CMS). Data for an enquiry such as this will be able to be produced in the future by cross-matching the racist/religiously aggravated hate crime 'flag' on CMS with cases where the victim's religion/belief category is 'Jewish'.

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Data collection

5. The All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism noted that the majority of British Jews live in areas in which police services have established systems to monitor anti-Jewish incidents, namely, the areas served by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP). Agreement for the CPS to approach these forces and request their electronic data for 2006/07 was obtained from the ACPO Head of the Race and Diversity Business Area.
6. In order to provide as full as possible a response to recommendation 8, CPS requested electronic data from the MPS and the GMP on:
• the number of antisemitic incidents reported;
• the numbers of those reported incidents that were subsequently recorded as a crime;
• the number of those recorded crimes where No Further Action (NFA) was taken, including reasons why NFA was taken;
• details of any police disposals that were used, and;
• details of any antisemitic crimes that were charged with a racially or religiously aggravated offence.
7. Both the MPS and the GMP provided the CPS with electronic data on the above. The MPS additionally granted CPS access to their electronic Crime Report Information System (CRIS). This allowed for more detailed data collection for variables including: offence category; whether there was an accused person; whether the police took NFA and the reason for NFA; whether the police consulted the CPS regarding a police disposal or for charging advice; the reasons for any police disposals and; any advice given by the CPS. All data were input into an electronic database.
8. The National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) ensures consistency of crime recording across the police. [Note: Home Office Counting Rules for Recorded Crime, April 2007, Annex A: National Crime Recording Standard.] The police adopt a general rule of one crime per victim, where specific, intended or identifiable victims are involved. For crimes against the person, the victim is the person assaulted or threatened; for crimes against property, the victim is generally the owner of the property targeted. Furthermore, an incident comprising a sequence of crimes committed by the same offender (or group of offenders) in relation to the same victim is generally counted as one crime if reported to the police at the same time.
9. URNs provided by the police for charged cases were used by CPS to identify relevant cases in CMS in order to ascertain the charge, plea, prosecution outcome and reasons for any unsuccessful outcomes.

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Methodological issues

10. The total number of incidents recorded as crimes (290) does not equal the totals for subsequent outcomes, namely, recorded crimes with no suspect identified; recorded crimes resulting in NFA; police disposals; and charged cases (279). This is due to differences in the units of analysis in the data collected from the MPS. It was not possible in the time available to reconcile the data collected with police records in order to access the additional information. Information on subsequent outcomes was therefore unavailable for 11 incidents recorded as crimes. This discrepancy is acknowledged in the report commentary, where appropriate, and clearly footnoted, where applicable, in tables and figures.
11. The total number of recorded crimes that resulted in a charge (31) does not equal the total number of cases that went forward to prosecution (26), because cases can involve more than one charge, and more than one victim (which, under NCRS, means more than one recorded crime).
12. The outcome of the principal offence in each case was considered in this research. Where a case had more than one defendant, the prosecution outcome was recorded as guilty if at least one defendant was found guilty.
13. Information on the relevant cases was not always available on CMS as the case summary had been destroyed. It is CPS policy that when a case is finalised, the CMS record will have a destruction or review date entered. The system has default destruction date settings of one year after finalisation for those cases heard in the magistrates' courts and three years after finalisation for those cases heard in the Crown Court, with the caseworker or administrator entering later dates if the sentence exceeds these minimum periods.
14. It should also be noted that the relatively small and likely unrepresentative sample used for this analysis means that caution should be exercised when attempting to draw inferences on the extent and characteristics of antisemitic crime at a national level.

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