Ms Lois West:

I think this probably relates to the crime counting rules. That would be one of the issues we identified in the course of this work. It definitely appears as though there have been slightly different interpretations of the crime counting rules. To us it was very clear that if, for example, a person was the victim of an assault and some time subsequent to that assault he or she passed away as a result, that would immediately warrant that incident being upgraded to a homicide.

In reality, what was happening in a lot of cases was that a sudden death incident was being created to reflect the fact that the person had died. That may have happened because he or she had passed away in a hospital in another district. However, there did not seem to be this correct interpretation of the crime counting rules that when a person passed away as the result of an assault, it was immediately to be upgraded to a homicide on the PULSE system.