Crime statistics in the United Kingdom

In addition, they collect data about the perception of issues such as antisocial behaviour and the criminal justice system.

The annual publication 'Crime in England & Wales' produced by the Home Office began to break the figures down to a smaller area in 1996.

[4] Commenting on figures from 1 April 1998 onwards, the then-Home Secretary Jack Straw said "changes in the way crime statistics are compiled are in line with recommendations by senior police officers.

[5] The largest increases were recorded in the "Violence Against the Person" category owing to the inclusion of common assault figures to accompany other offence types within this category that include assault occasioning actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, harassment, murder, possession of offensive weapons and a selection of other low volume violent crimes grouped together by the Metropolitan Police as 'other violence'.

The change in counting rules, and the significant impact it had on violence against the person figures, was often misconstrued by the media as real increases.

[12] The Metropolitan Police have made detailed crime figures, broken down by category at borough and ward level, available on their website since 2000.

[16] Crimes are under-reported, as victims may be reluctant to report them due to considering it too trivial, embarrassing, aversion to dealing with the police, or fear of repercussions by the perpetrators.

[19] One issue identified was no-criming, the practice of writing off reported notifiable offences from police force statistics.

The failure to properly record crime was called "inexcusably poor" and "indefensible" by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor.

I remember being a detective constable where we used to write off crimes".In April 2013, the framework for reporting of official police statistics was amended to address these issues.

[24] After the 2014 changes, five yearly rolling compliance audits by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire Rescue Service found that police force still do not uniformly comply with The National Crime Recording Standards.

This makes England and Wales worse than Denmark, Australia, Japan, but much safer than France, United States, Canada, Belgium.".

[31] 25,700 children above the age of criminal responsibility, 10, and beneath majority, 18, were found guilty of indictable offences in 2017, and a further 13,500 cautioned [32] England and Wales has a prison population of over 75,000 (2018 estimate) and 3000 with home curfew.

Javed Khan of Barnardo's said over the ONS statistics, “Knife crime is a symptom of a much wider, complex problem.

[42] Between April 2008 and 2009, there were just over 110,000 crimes recorded by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, an increase of 1.5% on the previous year.