Dundee City's crime rate of *** crimes per 10,000 people was the highest of any region of Scotland in 2023/24. The rate for the whole of Scotland was *** per 10,000 people, which appears to be driven by low crime in places such as the Orkney and Shetland Islands, with almost all Scottish cities reporting higher than average crime rates. In Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, the crime rate was *** crimes per 10,000 people, while in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, the crime rate was *** per 10,000 population. Comparisons with the rest of the UK When compared with the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland has experienced a noticeable decline in its overall crime rate. In 2008/09 for example, Scotland's crime rate was higher than that of England and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland, the other two jurisdictions in the UK. In 2022/23, however, Scotland's crime rate was the lowest in the UK, with the crime rate in England and Wales rising noticeably during the same period. Scotland's homicide rate has also fallen, from being the highest in the UK in 2002/03, to the lowest as of 2022/23. Theft and fraud drive recent crime uptick There was a slight increase in the number of crimes recorded by the Scottish police in 2023/24, when compared with the previous year. Although many other types of crimes declined during this reporting year, the number of theft offences has increased, reaching ******* offences in 2023/24. Fraud crime has also increased significantly in recent years, with ****** offences in 2022/23, compared with just ***** in 2014/15. The recent uptick in fraud and theft offences is also reflected in the jurisdiction England and Wales.

This graph presents the crime rate of *** leading business cities within the United Kingdom (UK) in 2015. The data shows that Edinburgh has the lowest amount of crimes committed per 1000 inhabitants. The first **** cities with the lowest crime rate in this statistic are located in Scotland and the North of England.

Between 2019/20 and 2023/24 there have been 47 homicide cases in the Glasgow City local authority area of Scotland, the most of any Scottish local authority in that time period. The City of Edinburgh had the second-highest number of homicides, at 24, while there were zero homicides in the Outer Hebrides.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

Since the end of the second world war, police recorded crime has risen dramatically in both England and Wales and, to a lesser extent, Scotland. Crime surveys have revealed a less dramatic increase in crime in England and Wales (Mirrlees-Black et al, 1996), and little if any in Scotland (MVA, 1998), and suggest that increases in police recorded crime figures are largely due to an increased propensity for the public to report crime. There is evidence to suggest, however, that there has been a real increase in problem behaviour among young people, paralleled by postwar increases in other psychosocial disorders during the teenage years (Smith and Rutter, 1995). In addition, evidence consistently suggests that the rate of offending among males is higher than that among females, although the gap is starting to narrow.

The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (ESYTC) aims to further our understanding of young people’s involvement in criminal behaviour, and explore the striking differences in offending rates and anti-social behaviour between males and females. It is a longitudinal study involving an entire year group of children, namely those eligible to start first year of secondary school in the City of Edinburgh in 1998. The cohort comprises approximately 4,300 young people who were aged between 11.5 and 12.5 years at the start of the study. Annual sweeps of data collection are conducted, with the intention of tracking the cohort through their teenage years and into early adulthood. The UK Data Archive currently holds data from Waves One to Four.

While the study focuses entirely on criminal offending among a generation of young people within the City of Edinburgh, the findings are likely to be of wider national and international relevance and importance. National comparisons will be made with other related studies in Scotland and the rest of the UK (such as crime surveys, health and drug studies, etc). The international dimension will be developed through direct comparisons with cohort studies in Denver, Pittsburgh and Rochester, and links with other studies in Chicago, Philadelphia, Dunedin and Stockholm.

In the 2023/24 reporting year, there were 50,558 crimes recorded in Glasgow City, the most of any local authority in Scotland. The Orkney Islands by comparison had just 521 crimes recorded in the same period.

This data shows the recored crime in England and Wales for 2010-11. Crimes are listed against the police force areas and are broken down into broad categories such as crimes against persons, burglary, sexual crimes (sexual assault, rape, exposure), fraud, drugs and robbery. This data was sourced from Home Office (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1011/) and then manipulated in excel and joined with Police Force areas dataset from ShareGeo (http://hdl.handle.net/10672/313) in a GIS. Data is in shapefile format. GIS vector data. This dataset was first accessioned in the EDINA ShareGeo Open repository on 2012-08-24 and migrated to Edinburgh DataShare on 2017-02-21.

There were 58 murder and culpable homicide crimes recorded by the police in Scotland in the 2022/23 reporting year, compared with 52 in the previous year.

The homicide rate in Scotland was **** homicides per one million people in the 2023/24 reporting year, compared with **** homicides per one million people in 2004/05.

The dataset comprises harmonised data containing information about subjects studied and attainment achieved (for each subject and overall) in upper-secondary education (S5/S6) by respondents of the Scottish Young People's Surveys/Scottish School Leavers’ Surveys (1984-2002 cohorts) who took part in the follow-up surveys when they were aged 18-19. The data for the 1984-1991 cohorts were collected as part of the Scottish Young People's Surveys (see SN 33227) conducted by the Centre for Educational Sociology based at the University of Edinburgh and the data for the 1996, 1998 and 2002 cohorts were provided by the Scottish Qualification Authority and subsequently linked to the Scottish School Leavers' Surveys (see SN 33266)conducted by the National Centre for Social Research and funded by the Scottish Executive.

The Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) Phase II is a Research Centre that aims to develop a dynamic and pioneering set of projects to improve our understanding of current social issues in the UK and provide policy makers and practitioners with the evidence to build a better future. Three principal cross-cutting research strands will exploit existing high-quality data resources: (1) Education and Social Stratification will focus on social class differences in entry to, progression in and attainment at tertiary education and how they affect individuals' labour market outcomes and their civic participation; (2) Crime and Victimisation will explore the dramatic change in crime rates in Scotland and other jurisdictions and examines the determinants and impact of criminal careers amongst populations of offenders; and (3) Urban Segmentation and Inequality which will create innovative new measures of social segmentation and combine these with cutting-edge longitudinal and sorting-model techniques to explore the causes of neighbourhood segmentation, household location choice and neighbourhood inequalities. Five additional projects will focus on the referendum on Scottish independence, location dynamics and ethnicity and exploiting existing datasets. The research will fed into training activities and knowledge exchange events aimed at boosting capacity in quantitative methods amongst the UK social science community.

The LDOES project investigated the dynamics of changing neighbourhood populations over two decades in Scotland. The project has substantive links with two other ESRC projects: AQMeN II Urban Segmentation (PI: Susan McVie, Edinburgh) and Dynamics of Ethnic Identity & Inequality (PI: James Nazroo, Manchester). The project identified a lack of available information on ethnic migration dynamics in inter-census years. The Registers of Scotland (RoS) property transactions data was used to address this deficit. The RoS data captures each and every property transaction in Scotland between 1990 and 2014 as well as the names of buyers and sellers. Additional work was done by the AQMeN team to impute the ethnicity and religion of buyers using the name-classification software Onomap. This deposit contains tables for annual ethnic and religious inflows into an area based on the names of property buyers. The aggregation is at the level of 2001 Scottish Datazones (each unit covers between 500 – 1000 residents).

The Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) Phase II is a Research Centre that aims to develop a dynamic and pioneering set of projects to improve our understanding of current social issues in the UK and provide policy makers and practitioners with the evidence to build a better future. Three principal cross-cutting research strands will exploit existing high-quality data resources: (1) Education and Social Stratification will focus on social class differences in entry to, progression in and attainment at tertiary education and how they affect individuals' labour market outcomes and their civic participation; (2) Crime and Victimisation will explore the dramatic change in crime rates in Scotland and other jurisdictions and examines the determinants and impact of criminal careers amongst populations of offenders; and (3) Urban Segmentation and Inequality which will create innovative new measures of social segmentation and combine these with cutting-edge longitudinal and sorting-model techniques to explore the causes of neighbourhood segmentation, household location choice and neighbourhood inequalities. Five additional projects will focus on the referendum on Scottish independence, location dynamics and ethnicity and exploiting existing datasets. The research will fed into training activities and knowledge exchange events aimed at boosting capacity in quantitative methods amongst the UK social science community.

There were 10,835 handling offensive weapon crimes recorded by the police in Scotland between March 2023 and April 2024, a peak for this type of crime during the provided time period.