Glos Police – Proportionality – Census 2021

“Disproportionality not as great as when we based it on the old census.”

A concerning snippet from the March 2023 Stop and Search Quarterly Governance Meeting at the Constabulary.

Extract from the meeting minutes

These ethnicity numbers that the Constabulary has used to populate their dashboard look to be very strange. The 'White' total can be deduced by 100-(1.5+4.5+0.9+6.3)=86.8%.

We tried to double check via the ONS web site but they do not offer a way to analyse by County (which is what we assume this data represents).

So we had to revert to the bulk datasets available via the Nomis web site and picked data for the following 'geography codes' which cover the force area:-

Whichever way we looked at the data loaded into the dashboard, it does not match our subset of the 2021 census data.

It is clear from this summary that the 'tweaks' the Constabulary have done to their backoffice systems will make their 'proportionality' analysis far different than reality.

Summary of 'untweaked' census data

The obvious conclusion is that with proper community representation at these meetings errors such as this would spotted in an instant.