Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System 1998

Chapter 4
Arrests and cautions
Introduction
4.1 Just under 2 million persons suspected of
committing an offence are arrested every year.
They may be arrested for any offence which
carries the possibility of a custodial sentence.
This definition is wider than the normal one
used for the notifiable offences which are
covered in the police recorded crime statistics.
An arrested suspect may be subsequently
charged, cautioned, dealt with by other means
(e.g. informal action) or released without
further action. Information collected from
police forces currently provides only the total
number of arrests (and for most forces those
arrests resulting from notifiable offences).
4.2 FitzGerald and Sibbitt (1997) have stressed
the importance of a cautious approach to the
analysis of the data and have noted that
comparisons between forces may be
misleading. In particular, on the arrest figures:
a) it is known that the basis of the arrest
figures may vary between forces although,
for the purposes of ethnic monitoring, the
Home Office has attempted to adopt a
standardised approach. This covers the
current inclusion of warrants, place of
safety orders and prison to court transfers
although these will be excluded from 1
April 1999;
b) the offence patterns differ amongst ethnic
groups; and
c) it is difficult to establish the implications
of ethnic differences in the arrest figures
without additional information on the
action taken following an arrest. Phillips
and Brown (1998) found that although
similar proportions of white and black
suspects were charged within a sample of
cases in 1993/94, both black and Asian
suspects were significantly less likely than
white suspects to be cautioned and more
likely to have no further action taken.
Section 95
To identify more clearly some of these
differences, police forces have been asked to
provide the Home Office with information on
the age group, gender and offence group of all
arrests for notifiable offences from 1 April
1998 on a voluntary basis prior to the
mandatory collection of data on this basis
from 1 April 1999.
4.3 For cautioning it is important to note that:
Results
a) there has been considerable variation in the
use of cautioning amongst police forces,
although following a Home Office circular
(18/1994) cautioning is normally only
available for first offenders;
b) the use of the caution varies also by
offence group so variations between ethnic
groups may partly reflect ethnic
differences in patterns of offending;
c) in cases where cautioning is an option, the
offender's eligibility to be cautioned
depends on a number of factors, including
whether they admit committing the
offence. FitzGerald (1993) has shown that
black people were, on average, less likely
to do so than white people. Phillips and
Brown (1998) has also suggested this may
account for the higher proportions of
black people where there was no further
action taken.
Arrests (Tables 4.1-4.3)
4.4 1.96 million arrests were made in 1997/98 of
which 137,800 (7%) were recorded as being
of black people, 80,100 (4%) of Asian and
18,500 (1%) of 'Other' non-white groups
(Table 4.1). Overall, black people were 5
times more likely to be arrested than white
people in the ten forces considered (Table 4.2).
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