This graph shows the annual number of police-reported racially motivated hate crimes that have occurred in England and Wales from April 2009 to 2020. After a decrease during the years 2010 and 2013, annual increases were featured in the following years, resulting in a peak reaching over 78 thousand recorded cases of racist hate crime 2018/19.

In the 2023/24 reporting year there were 140,561 hate crime incidents reported by the police in England and Wales compared with 147,645 in the previous year.

Data on the number of police recorded racially or religiously aggravated harassment incidents in England and Wales from 2008/09 to 2019/20 shows that in the most recent period there was a rise in incidents, with the number reaching 4810.

There were 20,944 incidences of racist hate crime reported by the London Metropolitan Police in the 2023/24 reporting year, by far the most of any police force area in England and Wales. In the same time period, there were 7,466 racist incidents reported in the West Midlands.

Police recorded crime figures by Police Force Area and Community Safety Partnership areas (which equate in the majority of instances, to local authorities).

7.7% of White women reported being the victim of domestic abuse in the year to March 2020, compared with 3.6% of White men.

This publication can be accessed here

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 crime rate in the United Kingdom was highest in England and Wales in 2023/24, at **** crimes per 1,000 people, compared with Scotland which had ** crimes per 1,000 population and Northern Ireland, at **** 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 **** crimes per 1,000 people in 2002/03, to just **** by 2021/22. Overall crime on the rise In 2022/23 there were approximately **** million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, with this falling to **** 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 **** billion pounds, with this cut to between ***** billion and ***** 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 ******* police officers in the UK, with this increasing to ******* by 2023. A creaking justice system During the period of austerity, the Ministry of Justice as a whole saw its budget sharply decline, from *** billion pounds in 2009/10, to just **** 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 *** days for a crown court case to go from offence to conclusion, compared with *** 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.

In 2020/21 there were over 2.7 thousand race or religiously motivated assaults recorded by the police in England and Wales, compared with 3.3 thousand in the previous year, which was also the peak for this type of crime in the provided time period.

In 2019/20, the 16 to 24 age group had the most homicides in England and Wales, at 142, compared with 138 for those aged 25 to 34, and 133 for those aged 35 to 44. Among the 16 to 24 age group, there were 53 white victims, 51 black victims, 14 Asian victims, and a further 24 from other ethnic groups.

Between 2012 and 2020, the number of self-inflicted deaths among white prisoners in public prisons in England and Wales went up from 49 to 57.

There were 1,064 public order offences recorded by the police in Northern Ireland between in the 2023/24 reporting year, which was a slight decrease compared with the previous year.

In 2023, there were four homicide offences recorded in the Northern Ireland policing district of Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon, and one each in seven other districts. In this reporting year, there were 11 homicides in Northern Ireland, with three policing districts recording no homicide offences.