Ms Lois West:

One of the biggest issues has been borne out in the work done in the course of this particular task. There are a number of discriminatory or motivating factors for an incident. Domestic abuse is one, there also is one for hate crime and there are a number of others. There is a lack of consistency in completing those fields. In a majority of cases they are just not filled out at all. As analysts, we are scientists who use data and these are the fields we would use to try to aggregate data to be able to look at particular trends.

It has always been difficult for us to do any kind of quality reporting in respect of hate crime and domestic incidents for that reason. It becomes a very manual process where an analyst actually has to go in and trawl through what is called the PULSE narrative. A small amount of information is entered into the PULSE narrative about the incident. Sometimes it might say in there that it is a domestic incident, for example, a husband and a wife. However, that does not translate into the motivating factor being ticked for domestic and that is really the way the figures are compiled. That is a big problem.