Abstract
What proportion of ambulance records documenting injuries caused by criminal violence is included in police records for violent crimes occurring in the same area at the same dates and times as incidents found in ambulance records? We analysed subsets of three datasets during matched time periods: West Midlands Ambulance Service records of all 36,639 incidents of violent injuries from January 2012 to March 2017; 132,317 West Midlands Police records of violent crimes from January 2012 to December 2015; and 9083 records of treatment of violent injuries as recorded in hospital Emergency Department (ED) records covering September 2013 to March 2016. We compared all incidents in the ambulance dataset and ED data to corresponding locations and times in incidents recorded in police datasets.