Dundee City's crime rate of 847 crimes per 10,000 people was the highest of any region of Scotland in 2023/24. The rate for the whole of Scotland was 550 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 812 crimes per 10,000 people, while in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, the crime rate was 679 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 111,054 offences in 2023/24. Fraud crime has also increased significantly in recent years, with 16,789 offences in 2022/23, compared with just 6,913 in 2014/15. The recent uptick in fraud and theft offences is also reflected in the jurisdiction England and Wales.

In 2023/24 the crime rate in Scotland was 561 crimes per 10,000 people, one of the lowest crime rates recorded in this time period. After peaking at 1,007 in 2004/05, the crime rate in Scotland has fallen significantly, reaching a low in the 2021/22 reporting year.

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.

In 2023/24 there were 25,205 crimes against public justice recorded by the police in Scotland, with the 2020/21 figure the highest for this type of crime since 2011/12, when there were 26,635 crimes of this type recorded.

The 694 data zones in Glasgow ranked in 2012, 2009, and 2006 for the crime domain in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). Each data zone also has a local ranking i.e. within Glasgow to ease comparison for that data zone over time and within the city. Intermediate Geographies and political geographies such as the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary Constituencies, multi-member wards are also included. Datazones nest directly into intermediate geographies and local authorities but do not fit exactly into higher geographies like multi-member wards, SIMD FAQ The Scottish Government describes this index as follows, 'The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across all of Scotland in a consistent way. It allows effective targeting of policies and funding where the aim is to wholly or partly tackle or take account of area concentrations of multiple deprivation. The SIMD ranks small areas (called data zones) from most deprived (ranked 1) to least deprived (ranked 6,505). People using the SIMD will often focus on the data zones below a certain rank, for example, the 5%, 10%, 15% or 20% most deprived data zones in Scotland.' How to use the SIMD - Scottish Government Guidance Data extracted 2013-12-17 from opendatascotland.org and data.glasgow.gov.uk Data supplied by The Scottish Government Licence: None simd-crime-2006-2012-glasgow-v2.xlsx - https://dataservices.open.glasgow.gov.uk/Download/Organisation/728522f0-86da-48c6-8f75-1649934eb8a4/Dataset/e021aa52-e858-4770-bd2b-733a9c53d84d/File/56b9ecbd-340b-4f6c-8c26-adfd0205c04e/Version/8d4fa076-3db5-4c40-ab0a-531ba242aeb0

In 2023/24 there were 5,992 hate crime charges reported to the prosecution service in Scotland, compared with 5,905 in the previous year.

The crime rate in the United Kingdom was highest in England and Wales in 2023/24, at 89.7 crimes per 1,000 people, compared with Scotland which had 55 crimes per 1,000 population and Northern Ireland, at 52.3 crimes per 1,000 people. During this time period, the crime rate of England and Wales has usually been the highest in the UK, while Scotland's crime rate has declined the most, falling from 93.4 crimes per 1,000 people in 2002/03, to just 52.3 by 2021/22. Overall crime on the rise In 2022/23 there were approximately 6.74 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, with this falling to 6.66 million in 2023/24. Although crime declined quite significantly between 2002/03 and 2013/14, this trend has been reversed in subsequent years. While there are no easy explanations for the recent uptick in crime, it is possible that reduced government spending on the police service was at least partly to blame. In 2009/10 for example, government spending on the police stood at around 19.3 billion pounds, with this cut to between 17.58 billion and 16.35 billion between 2012/13 and 2017/18. One of the most visible consequences of these cuts was a sharp reduction in the number of police officers in the UK. As recently as 2019, there were just 150,000 police officers in the UK, with this increasing to 171,000 by 2023. A creaking justice system During the period of austerity, the Ministry of Justice as a whole saw its budget sharply decline, from 9.1 billion pounds in 2009/10, to just 7.35 billion by 2015/16. Although there has been a reversal of the cuts to budgets and personnel in the justice system, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the depleted service hard in 2020. A backlog of cases grew rapidly, putting a strain on the ability of the justice system to process cases quickly. As of the first quarter of 2023, for example, it took on average 676 days for a crown court case to go from offence to conclusion, compared with 412 days in 2014. There is also the issue of overcrowding in prisons, with the number of prisoners in England and Wales dangerously close to operational capacity in recent months.

There were 16,624 fraud crimes recorded by the police in Scotland in 2023/24, a slight fall on 2022/23, but a significant increase compared with previous reporting years, such as in 2019/20 when there were 11,939 of these offences.

The homicide rate in Scotland was 10.4 homicides per one million people in the 2023/24 reporting year, compared with 26.9 homicides per one million people in 2004/05.

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.

The police in Scotland recorded 2,522 rape or attempted rape crimes in 2023/24, compared with 2,529 rape crimes in the previous reporting year

There were approximately 8,796 housebreaking offences recorded in Scotland in 2022/23,compared with 8,489 in the previous reporting year.

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.

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.

In 2023/24 there were 1,818 sexual orientation hate crime charges reported to the prosecution service in Scotland, the highest number of hate crime charges of this type during the provided time period.

In 2023/24 there were 25,344 drug offences recorded by the police in Scotland. Between 2002/03 and 2023/24 the number of drug offences in Scotland has fluctuated, peaking in 2005/06 at 44,247 and falling to its lowest figure in the most recent year.

There were 1,922 robbery offences in Scotland in 2023/24 compared with 1,623 in the previous reporting year. Between 2002/03 and 2015/16 robbery offences in Scotland declined from 4,636 to just 1,327, although there has been a slight increase in the number of offences recently.

In 2023/24, 84 transgender hate crime charges were reported to the public prosecution service in Scotland, compared with the previous year when there were 67.

There were 14,484 sexual crimes in Scotland in 2023/24, almost double the amount recorded ten years earlier. Since 2008/09 sexual offences have increased in almost every reporting year in Scotland with the peak occurring in 2021/22, at 15,049 sexual offences.

There were 1,572 racist crime offences recorded by the police in Scotland in the 2023/24 reporting year, an increase on the previous year, when there were 1,468 racially motivated crime offences.