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 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

This is an Official Statistics bulletin produced by statisticians in the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics. It brings together, for the first time, a range of official statistics from across the crime and criminal justice system, providing an overview of sexual offending in England and Wales. The report is structured to highlight: the victim experience; the police role in recording and detecting the crimes; how the various criminal justice agencies deal with an offender once identified; and the criminal histories of sex offenders.

Providing such an overview presents a number of challenges, not least that the available information comes from different sources that do not necessarily cover the same period, the same people (victims or offenders) or the same offences. This is explained further in the report.

Victimisation through to police recording of crimes

Based on aggregated data from the ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’ in 2009/10, 2010/11 and 2011/12, on average, 2.5 per cent of females and 0.4 per cent of males said that they had been a victim of a sexual offence (including attempts) in the previous 12 months. This represents around 473,000 adults being victims of sexual offences (around 404,000 females and 72,000 males) on average per year. These experiences span the full spectrum of sexual offences, ranging from the most serious offences of rape and sexual assault, to other sexual offences like indecent exposure and unwanted touching. The vast majority of incidents reported by respondents to the survey fell into the other sexual offences category.

It is estimated that 0.5 per cent of females report being a victim of the most serious offences of rape or sexual assault by penetration in the previous 12 months, equivalent to around 85,000 victims on average per year. Among males, less than 0.1 per cent (around 12,000) report being a victim of the same types of offences in the previous 12 months.

Around one in twenty females (aged 16 to 59) reported being a victim of a most serious sexual offence since the age of 16. Extending this to include other sexual offences such as sexual threats, unwanted touching or indecent exposure, this increased to one in five females reporting being a victim since the age of 16.

Around 90 per cent of victims of the most serious sexual offences in the previous year knew the perpetrator, compared with less than half for other sexual offences.

Females who had reported being victims of the most serious sexual offences in the last year were asked, regarding the most recent incident, whether or not they had reported the incident to the police. Only 15 per cent of victims of such offences said that they had done so. Frequently cited reasons for not reporting the crime were that it was ‘embarrassing’, they ‘didn’t think the police could do much to help’, that the incident was ‘too trivial or not worth reporting’, or that they saw it as a ‘private/family matter and not police business’

In 2011/12, the police recorded a total of 53,700 sexual offences across England and Wales. The most serious sexual offences of ‘rape’ (16,000 offences) and ‘sexual assault’ (22,100 offences) accounted for 71 per cent of sexual offences recorded by the police. This differs markedly from victims responding to the CSEW in 2011/12, the majority of whom were reporting being victims of other sexual offences outside the most serious category.

This reflects the fact that victims are more likely to report the most serious sexual offences to the police and, as such, the police and broader criminal justice system (CJS) tend to deal largely with the most serious end of the spectrum of sexual offending. The majority of the other sexual crimes recorded by the police related to ‘exposure or voyeurism’ (7,000) and ‘sexual activity with minors’ (5,800).

Trends in recorded crime statistics can be influenced by whether victims feel able to and decide to report such offences to the police, and by changes in police recording practices. For example, while there was a 17 per cent decrease in recorded sexual offences between 2005/06 and 2008/09, there was a seven per cent increase between 2008/09 and 2010/11. The latter increase may in part be due to greater encouragement by the police to victims to come forward and improvements in police recording, rather than an increase in the level of victimisation.

After the initial recording of a crime, the police may later decide that no crime took place as more details about the case emerge. In 2011/12, there were 4,155 offences initially recorded as sexual offences that the police later decided were not crimes. There are strict guidelines that set out circumstances under which a crime report may be ‘no crimed’. The ‘no-crime’ rate for sexual offences (7.2 per cent) compare

From 1 April 2012, the British Crime Survey (BCS) will be known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales to better reflect its geographical coverage.

While the survey did previously cover the whole of Great Britain, it ceased to include Scotland in its sample in the late 1980s. There is a separate survey - the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey - covering Scotland.

From 1 April 2012, National Statistics on crime previously published by the Home Office will be published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

For more information see the http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Crime+in+England+and+Wales" class="govuk-link">ONS Crime in England and Wales web page.

Queries regarding these outputs should be directed to crimestatistics@ONS.gov.uk.

Key publications

• http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/consult-bcs-ipvq-2011/hos-response-bcs-ipv-0112" class="govuk-link">Consultation on the British Crime Survey intimate personal violence questionnaire - Response from Home Office Statistics
  19 January 2012
• http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/bcs1011tech1" class="govuk-link">British Crime Survey 2010-11 technical report
  1 December 2011

More publications

• See more http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/" class="govuk-link">crime research and statistics publications
• http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/index.html" class="govuk-link">Archived RDS website - for publications from before May 2010

Our work

The Crime Survey for England and Wales, previously the British Crime Survey (BCS), is one of the largest social research surveys conducted in England and Wales. It asks people resident in households about their experiences of crime in face-to-face interviews.

In the 2010/11 BCS, around 51,000 people were interviewed, that is, around 47,000 adults aged 16 or over in the main survey and a further 4,000 interviews conducted with children aged 10 to 15. Find out more about this research with children at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/science-research/research-statistics/crime/crime-statistics/bcs-10-15-year-olds/" class="govuk-link">British Crime Survey 10 to 15-year-olds.

Around 1,000 interviews were carried out in each police force area in 2010/11. The overall response rate is currently 76 per cent - among the highest for the large continuous government surveys.

The first survey, in 1982, covered England, Wales and Scotland. Scotland now has its own survey (Scottish Crime & Justice Survey), as does Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Crime & Victimisation Survey).

Technical reports

Crime statisticians produce a technical report providing information on survey design, weighting and survey response every survey year. The latest available is http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/bcs1011tech1" class="govuk-link">British Crime Survey (England and Wales) 2010-11 technical report. See the National Archives for previous technical reports.

The design of the survey has changed over the years but the core set of questions asked about victimisation experiences have remained constant.

BCS datasets

Anonymised datasets from the BCS in SPSS format are available on the http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/" class="govuk-link">UK Data Archive through the http://www.esds.ac.uk/government/" class="govuk-link">Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS). Researchers, including students, who need data for dissertations or practical work can use these datasets.

The BCS is a complex study with data organised at different levels (households, individuals and incidents) but full supporting documentation and metadata are available with access to the data. Users who need help in analysing the data can contact the http://www.esds.ac.uk/government/contact/" class="govuk-link">ESDS Government helpdesk.

Interpersonal violence: question development for the BCS

We commissioned research to review questions in the BCS relating to intimate personal violen