Editorial
standards

Who we are

Crimes Weekly is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for any police force, the Crown Prosecution Service or Crimestoppers. Nobody pays for coverage and no force sees a script before broadcast.

Cases before the courts

This is the part that matters most to a press office, so it goes first.

Every story is screened for active proceedings before it can reach a running order. Not as a final read-through — as a step in the production system, applied to every candidate story automatically, with a written reason attached to each one.

Two details of how the screen works, because they are the difference between a real check and a box-tick:

• The headline outranks the body. A story about a fresh charge often recounts an earlier conviction further down. The headline states what the story is.
• Caution wins ties. Where an item carries both a concluded case and active proceedings — usually one defendant convicted while another awaits trial — it is treated as active. That is precisely the situation where reporting freely is riskiest.

Underlying all of it: charged is not convicted, and nobody is called guilty until a jury says so. We are mindful of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, and where we are unsure whether proceedings have concluded we hold the story rather than run it.

Takedowns and corrections

If a police force asks for an item to be pulled or updated, we act the same day. A person located, an appeal withdrawn, a suspect arrested, a conviction overturned, a name that should not have run — tell us and it goes, without an argument about whether we were entitled to publish it.

You do not need to explain why. An operational reason we are not entitled to know is reason enough.

The same address works for anyone else who believes we have got something wrong. If we have, we correct it and say that we did, rather than quietly editing.

Where the facts come from

Every story is built from what forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts have published themselves. We do not run unattributed claims and we do not run tip-offs we cannot stand up.

What we use

• Force newsrooms — appeals, wanted people and court outcomes, from forces across England and Wales, attributed to the force. Where a force publishes under the Open Government Licence we use it on those terms. Not every force does: where a force's own terms reserve its words or images, we ask its press office before using them.
• CPS press releases — post-conviction, so on safe ground.
• Force YouTube channels — embedded, never downloaded. Downloading would breach YouTube's terms even where the underlying footage is OGL, which is why we ask press offices for the broadcast-quality file instead.
• National and regional press — used to find a story, never as an asset. Their words and pictures are their copyright; we go back to the force for anything we broadcast.

What we deliberately do not take

Crimestoppers publishes a most-wanted gallery that would be useful to us. We do not automate any collection of it. The site sits behind protection that returns an error for its own robots.txt, so there is no readable statement of what the site permits — and "it happens to load" is not consent. A charity running appeals on behalf of victims is the wrong party to take chances with, so we read it by hand or not at all.

We mention this because it tells you more about how your own material will be treated than any assurance could.

Showing our working

The crime map is built from police.uk street-level data. Where a force has not published for a period, those constituencies are shown grey and left out of the rankings rather than being presented as the safest places in the country — because a gap in publication is not an absence of crime. The page says so, on the page.

Victims, families and the public

• Appeals are carried in full, with the force's reference number and the Crimestoppers line, so viewers know how to come forward.
• We do not publish anything that would identify a victim of a sexual offence, or a child, beyond what a force has already released.
• We do not speculate about motive, and we do not reconstruct an offence for effect.
• Where a family has asked for privacy, that is the end of it.