In its 2013/14 inspection programme HMIC committed to carry out an inspection of the 43 Home Office Police forces in England and Wales along with the British Transport Police and PSNI into the way the forces record crime data.
The central question of the inspection was “to what extent can police-recorded crime information be trusted. The national report, published on 18 November 2014, reported on how well police in England and Wales record crime. In it they found that, on average, 1 in 5 crimes was not recorded by the police, although some forces performed much better than this. The inspection in PSNI, although using data and crime records from a different time period, showed that PSNI performed strongly in comparison. The report has made seven recommendations to the PSNI.
HMIC: inspection of crime data integrity