These historic data tables contain figures up to September 2024 for:

1. Police recorded crime
2. Crime outcomes
3. Transferred/cancelled records (formerly ‘no-crimes’)
4. Knife crime
5. Firearms
6. Hate crime
7. Fraud crime
8. Rape incidents crime

There are counting rules for recorded crime to help to ensure that crimes are recorded consistently and accurately.

These tables are designed to have many uses. The Home Office would like to hear from any users who have developed applications for these data tables and any suggestions for future releases. Please contact the Crime Analysis team at crimeandpolicestats@homeoffice.gov.uk.

The open data tables are updated every three months to incorporate any changes such as reclassifications or crimes being cancelled or transferred to another police force, which means that they are more up-to-date than the tables published on this webpage which are updated once per year. Additionally, the open data tables are in a format designed to be user-friendly and enable analysis.

If you have any concerns about the way these data are presented please contact us by emailing CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk. Alternatively, please write to

This report presents key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information up to the year ending September 2024 with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer-term trends.

Statistician’s comment

Alongside increasing police charge rates, the volume of prosecutions and convictions at criminal courts continued to increase. For the more serious indictable offences prosecutions and convictions reached their highest level since the year to September 2017.

This rise in convictions for more serious offences has increased the number of offenders being sentenced to immediate custody, while the volumes of those remanded in custody continued to rise.

For defendants sentenced to custody, the average custodial sentence length reduced slightly but remains high. The reduction in the latest period is largely due to the change in offence mix of offences sentenced to custody, with more theft offences, which attract lower custodial sentences generally.

Details

This report presents key statistics on activity in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) for England and Wales. It provides commentary for the 12-month period of July 2024 to June 2025 (referred to as the ‘latest year’). The contents of this bulletin will be of interest to government policy makers in the development of policy and their subsequent monitoring and evaluation. Others will be interested in the way different crimes are dealt with in the CJS and trends in sentencing outcomes.

Statistician’s comment

The volume of prosecutions and convictions reached their highest levels since year ending June 2018, reflecting the increased demand entering the criminal courts as police charge volumes increase.

The use of out of court disposals increased in the latest year, reversing a downward trend seen since 2020. This was due to the continued increase in community resolutions, which now account for around 80% of all out of court disposals in the latest year. All other out of court disposals reduced.

The number of prosecutions increased for all indictable offences groups over the last year and the pattern followed for convictions, with the number of offenders convicted for violence against the person and sexual offences reaching series highs since comparable records from 2010.

The number of offenders sentenced to immediate custody continued to increase and is at the highest level seen since 2018. The latest year shows a slight reduction in the average custodial sentence length, partly driven by an increase in the proportion of sentences that are for theft offences which attract shorter sentence lengths.

Changes and revisions in this publication

Magistrates’ court data development

Please note as part of our ongoing data development, since the previous publication, we have identified some duplicate records that led to an exaggerated number of withdrawn cases at magistrates’ courts. Following case-level reviews and close working with system owners we have removed the duplicates and resolved the issue in this release.

This has led to the removal of 3,563 in the withdrawn disposal defendant counts in 2024 – trends remain broadly unchanged.

In addition, we have identified potential data quality concerns regarding the published plea counts at the magistrates’ courts. While work is ongoing to investigate identified discontinuities we have removed the plea data from our published magistrates’ data tool.

Crown Court data development (“One Crown”)

MoJ and HMCTS have worked together on the https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2Fmedia%2F67e298ced4a1b0665b8ee1fe%2FConsultation_on_One_Crown_changes_to_the_Crown_Court_data_processing_in_CCSQ.docx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK">“One Crown” data project to create a single, consistent and flexible dataset that meets both MoJ and HMCTS needs. This has brought greater transparency, clarity and coherence for all users of the published Criminal Court Statistics series.

Historically the two MoJ published series concerning criminal courts have been produced independently from distinct pipelines which is inefficient and risks undermining transparency. Moving to the same data model will improve the coherence across MoJ, provide a clear set of shared definitions across the topic for users and ensure the data best reflects operational reality of the underlying administrative systems.

We postponed the August 2025 publication of CJSQ to start the necessary data development and carry out quality assurance of the One Crown outputs. Good progress has been made and we are continuing to quality assure the data and refine definitions to ensure that the new CJS data series are robust before we adopt the change.

The data presented here is in line with the historical data pipelines. We hope to move to the One Crown pipeline from January 2026 – we will set out and quantify the impact of changes to the data pipeline alongside clear reasons for any observed change.

The areas of focus include: Victimisation, Police Activity, Defendants and Court Outcomes, Offender Management, Offender Characteristics, Offence Analysis, and Practitioners.

This is the latest biennial compendium of Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System and follows on from its sister publication Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System, 2017.

Introduction

This publication compiles statistics from data sources across the Criminal Justice System (CJS), to provide a combined perspective on the typical experiences of different ethnic groups. No causative links can be drawn from these summary statistics. For the majority of the report no controls have been applied for other characteristics of ethnic groups (such as average income, geography, offence mix or offender history), so it is not possible to determine what proportion of differences identified in this report are directly attributable to ethnicity. Differences observed may indicate areas worth further investigation, but should not be taken as evidence of bias or as direct effects of ethnicity.

In general, minority ethnic groups appear to be over-represented at many stages throughout the CJS compared with the White ethnic group. The greatest disparity appears at the point of stop and search, arrests, custodial sentencing and prison population. Among minority ethnic groups, Black individuals were often the most over-represented. Outcomes for minority ethnic children are often more pronounced at various points of the CJS. Differences in outcomes between ethnic groups over time present a mixed picture, with disparity decreasing in some areas are and widening in others.

Key findings

Victims

• The Asian ethnic group had the lowest proportion of both adults (2%) and children (5%) who had experienced personal crime in the last year. In 2018/19, both adults and children from the Asian ethnic group were half as likely to report victimisation when compared to the White ethnic group.
• A higher proportion of Black homicides were against children, 17% of Black victims were 17 or younger, compared to an average of 11% across all ethnicities. Between 2015/16 and 2017/18, Black children made up 20% of all child victims, while Black victims made up 13% of victims across all age groups.

Police Activity

• The proportion of stop and searches conducted on White suspects decreased from 75% in 2014/15 to 59% in 2018/19 and increased for all minority ethnic groups. The largest increases were from 13% to 22% for Black suspects and from 8% to 13% for Asian suspects.
• In the last five years, the proportion of stop and searches involving Black suspects in London increased from 30% to 37%, now equal to the number of White suspects searched. In 2018/19, 48% of all stop and searches (where ethnicity is known) were conducted in London, and increasingly involving a higher proportion of suspects from minority ethnic groups when compared to the rest of England and Wales.
• Black suspects had the highest proportion of arrests that resulted from stop and searches in the latest year, at 20% which has increased from 15% since 2014/15. This is driven by a higher number of stop and searches in London, where resultant arrests accounted for 22% of all arrests, compared to 5% for the rest of England and Wales. For other groups, between 6% and 13% of arrests resulted from stop and searches.
• In 2018/19, two thirds (67%) of children arrested in London were from minority ethnic groups, compared to 21% of children arrested in the rest of England and Wales. Just over half (52%) of adults arrested in London were from minority ethnic groups, compared to 22% of adults arrested in the rest of England and Wales.

Defendants

• In the latest year, the largest fall in the volume of prosecutions and convictions for indictable offences was seen in the Asian group, down by 22% and 20% respectively. Prosecutions and convictions fell by 18% and 16% for Black defendants, by 13% each for White defendants, by 8% and 10% for defendants from Mixed ethnic groups and by 7% and 14% for defendants from Chinese or Other ethnic groups.
• White defendants consistently had the highest conviction ratio for indictable offences over the last 5 years (with the exception of 2015) and was 85% in 2018. The conviction ratios for White, Asian (83%) and Black (81%) defendants have converged with each other over the last 5 years, remained constant for defendants from Mixed ethnic groups (77%) and fallen for Chinese or Other ethnic groups (75%).
• Compared to White defendants (38%), larger proportions of Asian (40%), Mixed ethnicity (45%), Black (46%) and Chinese or Other (46%) defendants were remanded in custody for indictable

Contents

1. Statistican’s comment

2. Knife and offensive weapon offences overview

3. Sentencing

4. Offending History

5. Sentencing under the Sentencing Act 2020

6. Further information

7. Future publications and contact details for any queries or feedback

8. Pre-release access

This publication presents key statistics describing the trends in the number of offenders receiving cautions and convictions for

• possession of an article with a blade or point

• possession of an offensive weapon, or

• threatening with either type of weapon

in England and Wales. Please note that cases still awaiting final decisions are no longer accounted for using estimation methodology. These are generally cases in the latest periods and are now counted as ‘other’ disposals until final decisions are made unless separately specified.

Accompanying files

As well as this bulletin, the following products are published as part of this release:

• ODS format tables containing data on knife or offensive weapon offences up to December 2022

• An interactive table tool to look at previous offences involving possession of a blade, point or offensive weapon. The tool provides further breakdowns by gender, police identified ethnicity and prosecuting police force area. The data used in the tool is also included as a separate csv file.

• An interactive https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/knife_possession_sankey/index.html" class="govuk-link">Sankey diagram looking at outcomes for offenders sentenced for these offences by whether or not they have a previous conviction or caution for possession of a blade, point or offensive weapon; which includes breakdowns by gender, age group and offence type.

Main points

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This report presents key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information up to the year ending September 2022 with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer-term trends.

Statistician’s comment:

The figures published today, for year ending September 2022, demonstrate the continued recovery of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) since the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the possible impact of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) action from April, which concluded in the autumn.

Prosecutions and convictions have increased in the latest year, however, they both remained below pre-pandemic levels. The increase in the latest year was driven by summary offences, while prosecutions for indictable offences decreased. For indictable offences, the only offence group to show an increase in prosecutions and convictions was sexual offences.

The custody rate for indictable offences has risen to levels seen pre-pandemic at 32% in the latest year, after a fall in the year ending September 2021. The average custodial sentence length (ACSL) for indictable offences has continued to rise from 24.0 months in the year ending September 2021 to 24.8 months in the latest year.