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Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Crime Statistics

Statistics

Contents

Crime In England & Wales

Crime in England & Wales is a document that combines both Recorded Crime Statistics (crime recorded by the police) and the British Crime Survey (crime as experienced by people - gathered from surveys) into a single document that will make comparisons between the two easier, and give a more complete picture of crime. Individual summaries for current Recorded Crime Figures and British Crime Survey are given below, but to see the full picture, you will need to download Crime In England & Wales 2008-09

Local crime data

The Home Office has produced an online tool that takes the data from Crime in England and Wales and allows you to interrogate it. You can look at specific regions or areas, and at either the general crime trend or the trend in 8 crime groupings: burglary, criminal damage, drug offences, fraud, robbery, sexual offences, vehicle and other theft and violent crimes.

Using the tool, you can display a graph of crime in your area and compare it to the national average. The tool also contains links to tip and advice on reducing crime, and links to what's going on in your area to reduce crime.

Visit the Crime Statistics Tool

Quarterly Updates

A supplementary update to Crime in England & Wales is published every three months. The most recent quarterly bulletin was published in January 2010 and covers the 12 months to September 2008.

Recorded Crime Statistics England & Wales

Recorded crime refers to notifiable offences recorded by the police according to the Home Office rules on counting and classification.

Details of the latest in a series of regular bulletins issued by Home Office Research Development and Statistics (RDS) Directorate are given below. Until 2002, two main bulletins were issued annually covering the 12 months to September and the 12 months to March. From 2002 onwards, the Recorded Crime Statistics have been published once per year as part of Crime in England & Wales.

Main points:

  • All police recorded crime down 5% to 4.7 million crimes
  • Violence against the person down 6%
  • with injury down 7%
  • Domestic burglary up 1%
  • Offences against vehicles down 10%
  • Theft from the person down 12%
  • Criminal damage down 10%
  • Robbery down 5%
  • Drugs offences up 6%

See Crime In England & Wales to download the full report

Previous bulletins are available in the publications area of the RDS website.

British Crime Survey

The British Crime Survey (BCS) asks randomly selected adults in private households about their experience of victimisation in the previous year. As well as the main crime counting element, a number of other crime-related issues are covered. To ensure comparability, most questions on victimisation have remained the same in each sweep of the BCS, but other topics have varied.

From 2002, BCS becomes an annual survey using a larger sample of nearly 40,000 people (previous high was 20,000). This will enable more accurate comparison with recorded crime statistics. Since 2002, the BCS has formed part of Crime in England & Wales.

Main points:

  • All BCS crime stable (10.7 million crimes in 2008/09)
  • Violent crime - stable
  • with injury - stable
  • Domestic burglary - stable
  • Vehicle-related theft - stable
  • Theft from the person up 25%
  • Vandalism - stable
  • Risk of being a victim of crime up from 22% to 23%

See Crime In England & Wales to download the full report

Home Office Research, Development & Statistics (RDS) Directorate

The Research, Development and Statistics Directorate (RDS) is an integral part of the Home Office and provides information that helps Ministers and policy makers take evidence-based decisions, and also helps the police, probation service, the courts, immigration officials and fire-fighters to do their jobs as effectively as possible. It does this by maintaining the various statistical services published by the Home Office and by carrying out research itself or commissioning others to do so.

Visit the RDS website to view publications, the RDS Research Programme, the Statistical Programme, and rds digest 4 - information on the criminal justice system

ASBO Statistics

This website also holds details of all ASBOs issued in England & Wales since April 1999.

Young People and Crime: Findings from the 2005 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey

This report presents the first findings from the 2005 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS). It focuses on levels and trends in youth offending, anti-social behaviour and victimisation among young people aged from 10 to 25 living in the general household population in England and Wales. The survey does not cover young people living in institutions, including prisons, or the homeless, and therefore excludes some high offending groups.

View Summary

Costs of Crime

Estimates of the social and economic costs of crime have an important role in achieving the most worthwhile reductions in crime for the resources spent on crime reduction. They increase the awareness of both policy-makers and the public of the full impact of crime on society and the potential gains that could result from reducing it. Without estimates of the costs of individual crimes, it would be difficult to make informed decisions about which policy measures are the most cost-effective and desirable. By permitting meaningful comparisons to be made of the costs and benefits of alternative crime reduction measures, they avoid the need to focus on other, perhaps less useful, indicators of benefit, such as the total numbers of different crimes. They can also help to prioritise, focusing scarce resources on policies that have the biggest impact on the harm caused by crime.

The Home Office provides official estimates of the costs of crime, most recently in 'The economic and social costs of crime against individuals and households 2003/04'.

Plastic Card Fraud

In 2004 plastic card fraud increased by 20% to more than £500m. With the exception of Northern Ireland, every region in in UK experienced a rise in card fraud in 2004. You can view a breakdown of plastic card fraud by fraud type and by region, published by APACS (the Association for Payment Clearing Services).

Review of Crime Statistics

2006 has seen 2 review of crime statistics, their function and their presentation

The Statistics Commission considered the following questions:
  • Does the public trust crime statistics?
  • Are messages about crime being lost in the volume of reports produced?
  • Do the statistics produced satisfy the high interest of the public?
  • Is there a better measure of 'Total Crime'?
  • Should we make greater use of local crime data?

View a summary of the Statistics Commission's Review of crime statistics

The Home Secretary also commissioned a review of crime statistics. This review considered only one question, but with a wide remit: What changes should be made to the production and release of crime statistics in order to restore public trust? The review made the following recommendations:

  • A shift in emphasis is required in the production and communication of crime information. The focus must shift from the publication, by the Home Office, of the aggregate national picture to a system of communication which encompasses local data at local level between police and their neighbourhood communities.
  • Both the scope and definitions of the national statistics that are produced need a radical overhaul. Significant groups of victims are not covered by current surveys and certain major current crime category definitions are confusing and misleading.
  • Governance, management and organisation of the police and Home Office environments in which crime statistics are produced and reported must be revised to provide the public with complete assurance of actual and perceived independence and integrity of the statistics
  • The Home Office should make the provision of local crime information a central part of its crime communication strategy and not just rely on publishing national crime statistics
  • The Home Office should ensure that investment in strategies and technology for the provision of appropriate local crime information be an integral part of the development of neighbourhood policing teams and a key means by which they are held accountable to their neighbourhoods
  • The Home Office needs to develop a strategy for providing useful local crime information that makes use of modern communications
  • Local crime information should be made available on the same geographic basis as the neighbourhood policing teams
  • Crime information made available locally should include all crime data (not just notifiable offences) and all incident data in all areas within 3 years
  • Police forces should have geo-coded crime and incident data as part of the rollout of neighbourhood policing teams. They should put in place the requirements to use this mapped data as a key means of sharing information with the public, including on a force website, within three years
  • Police forces should work with their local partner service providers to produce relevant information in mapped form on the same websites
  • The police should have a duty to provide local crime information as soon as possible or as necessary to respond to events

View a summary of Crime Statistics: An independent review

 

National Statistics

National Statistics is the UK government arm responsible for all government related statistics. The National Statistician is head of this service as well as Director of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

National Statistics provides a wide range of statistical information on social, health, economic, demographic, labour market and business topics. It also conducts social surveys and the population Census every 10 years, and has initiated a long-term project to make statistics available at neighbourhood level.

Click here to visit the National Statistics website.

International Crime Statistics

It can be difficult to compare crime statistics across countries due to different legal and administrative systems. There are some statistical comparisons of crime trends, including International comparisons of criminal justice statistics 1999, a bulletin published by the Home Office comparing data from European Union member states, European Union applicant countries and selected other countries. A further international comparison bulletin was published in November 2003.

In 2007 the report The burden of crime in the EU: A comparitive analysis of the European Crime and Safety Survey (EU ICS) examined crime in the 15 'old' EU member states and Poland, Hungary and Estonia. It found England & Wales to be a relatively high crime area in many crime types, though not fraud and corruption.

The latest set of statistics to be published by the US Department of Justice in October 2004 compares National crime rates between 8 countries during the period 1981 and 1999.

A number of websites provide lists of links to a variety of international crime and criminal justice statistical sources available on the internet. Two such sites are detailed in links to international websites.

Last update: Thursday, January 21, 2010

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