This graph shows the annual number of police-reported racially motivated hate crimes that have occurred in England and Wales from ********** 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 ** thousand recorded cases of racist hate crime 2018/19.

Data the number of hate crimes which involved violence against the victim in England and Wales from 2015 to 2019, sorted by motivational factor, shows that the highest number of hate crimes was found to be due to racial discrimination. During 2018/19, over ** thousand racist hate crimes were recorded, a sharp increase compared to the previous years.

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.

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 ***** disability hate crime incidents recorded by the police in West Yorkshire in 2023/24, the highest of any police force in England and Wales, in that reporting year. Disability hate crimes were also high in Greater Manchester, with *** incidents reported.

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The Realities Checked Study provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the crime and criminal justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in England since the 1960s. Motivated by the need to challenge and critique popular stereotypes that portray Gypsies and Travellers as inherently criminal, the study seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the community’s experiences with crime and the criminal justice system. The study’s primary aims were to examine: Gypsies’ and Travellers’ direct and vicarious perceptions of criminal victimisation, hate crimes, and offending; the role of perceived racism and discrimination in shaping offending behaviour and experiences with criminal justice; the impact of criminalisation, policing, punishment, and imprisonment on individuals and communities; and the rationales behind professional engagement with Gypsies and Travellers in the areas of crime, justice, and social policy.

Conducted between October 2020 and June 2023, this dataset employs a mixed-methods approach, including a crime survey of 400 participants of Gypsy and Traveller heritage, 40 oral histories with Gypsy and Traveller community members, 27 oral histories with Gypsy and Traveller prisoners, and interviews with 54 professionals working with Gypsy and Traveller communities. Research took place across England, including Leeds, Norfolk, the South-East (London, Sussex, and Surrey), Devon, and Cornwall. Participants included Gypsies and Travellers living roadside, on sites, on private plots, and in bricks-and-mortar housing. The crime survey focused on gathering data about the frequency of discrimination, racism, and crime experienced by Gypsies and Travellers. The oral histories explored participants’ life stories, including childhood, young adulthood, and experiences with crime. Professional interviews examined the work of professionals and organisations engaging with Gypsies and Travellers in relation to crime and criminal justice.

Historical accounts show that since the arrival in England and Scotland of Romani Gypsies in the fifteenth century, and of Irish Travellers in the nineteenth century, they have been associated with criminal offending. Since then Gypsies and Travellers (G&Ts) have become entrenched in popular, media and political imaginations as criminal predators, bringing property crime, violence, fraud, tax evasion and anti-social behaviour to settled communities. Yet despite five centuries' of such categorisation, there is surprisingly no rigorous evidence assessing the validity of such claims nor systematic assessments of G&Ts' experiences of victimisation. No existing sources of evidence from self-report offending surveys, archival accounts, oral histories, ethnographic or qualitative research can provide an estimate of G&T patterns of offending. Neither can they tell us about how frequently G&Ts are the victims of non-racially motivated crime (e.g. assault, burglary, theft) or hate crimes. This is particularly concerning given the Global Attitudes Survey found 50% of UK respondents held negative views of G&Ts, over double the proportion holding unfavourable attitudes towards Muslims, who have often been the victims of hate crimes. Estimates of offending, victimisation and hate crime are available for other minority ethnic groups.

This interdisciplinary study will produce the first comprehensive, historicized account of G&T experiences of victimisation, crime and criminal justice in two urban and two rural areas of England. Specifically, it will comprise:

(i) a crime survey involving researchers and G&T interviewers looking at G&T victimisation by personal crime (e.g. assault, hate crime) and crimes against the household/family (e.g. burglary, fraud). It will assess attitudes to, and contact with, the police (including stop and search), courts, probation, and prisons. The survey will also ask questions about G&Ts' use of alcohol/drugs and involvement in property, fraud, and violent offences as offenders. It will survey self-ascribing G&Ts who vary by gender, age and settlement (roadside living, official/private caravan sites, unauthorised encampments, and private/social housing);

(ii) community and prisoner oral histories to investigate whether offending over individual lifetimes is linked to experiences of racism and discrimination, and to explore the effects of actions by the police, courts, probation and prisons on G&T individuals and communities;

(iii) interviews with local professionals who have engaged with G&Ts in a variety of contexts, both operationally and strategically (e.g. police officers, Victim Support, housing officers, councillors, Police and Crime Commissioners). These will seek to find out the ways in which G&Ts and their lifestyles are understood and responded to in formal policies and operationally on the ground, as well as documenting where support services may need to be targeted in criminal justice and other service provision; and

(iv) archival research of governmental and other publically available historical sources, including council committee meeting minutes, county surveys of G&Ts' experience of policing and local petitions against official sites.

Taken together, these methods will provide, for the first time, numerical estimates of both victimisation and offending, whilst also illuminating the meaning attached to them by G&Ts, including the place of perceptions of racism in G&Ts' behaviour and experiences. The study will provide insight into how criminal justice and other statutory agencies have historically dealt with G&Ts compared with the contemporary picture. In this way it will build a sensitive account of G&Ts' experiences of crime as victims as well as offenders which can respond to the negative stereotyping of G&Ts drawing on rigorous evidence. This will inform policy and practice so as to reduce the harms of crime for all those affected, in both G&T and non-G&T communities.

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

Nature of sexual assault by rape or penetration experienced by adults since the age of 16 years, including breakdowns by age, sex, victim-perpetrator relationship, location and other factors. Analyses from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).

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

In 2024/25, there were 26,617 crimes against public justice recorded by the police in Scotland, the highest figure for this type of crime since 2011/12, when there were 26,635 crimes of this type recorded.

There were approximately 1.94 million violence against the person crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2024/25, compared with almost 2.01 million offences in the previous reporting year. The number of recorded violent crime offences in England and Wales has increased considerably in the last decade, with only around 600,000 violent crimes recorded in 2013/14. Other types of crime climbing After falling to relatively low levels in the mid-2010s, overall crime in England and Wales has been increasing at a substantial rate. From 62 crimes per 1,000 people in 2013/14, the crime rate shot up to a peak of 93.5 by 2022/23. The sharp uptick in the number of sexual offences recorded by the police accounts for part of this rise, with the number of sexual offences increasing from just over 64,000 in 2013/14 to almost 195,000 in 2022/23. While overall theft crime has gradually fallen in a similar time period, there has been a recent spike in shoplifting offences, with almost 444,000 incidents recorded in 2023/24, compared with 342,200 in 2022/23. Prisons under pressure The increase in violent and sexual crime offences, which typically result in longer sentences for offenders, has added to the problem of overcrowding at prisons in England and Wales. With prisons dangerously close to capacity in 2024, the government even released thousands of prisoners early that September. Prisons in England and Wales are also increasingly violent, for both staff and inmates, with assaults on staff reaching a high of over 2,700 incidents in the third quarter of 2024. Incidences of self-harm have also increased rapidly, from around 5,700 in early 2014 to almost 20,000 ten years later.

The police in Scotland recorded 2,897 rape or attempted rape crimes in 2024/25, compared with 2,522 rape crimes in the previous reporting year.

There were 15,253 fraud crimes recorded by the police in Scotland in 2024/25, a slight fall on the previous year, but a significant increase compared with previous reporting years, such as in 2019/20 when there were 11,939 of these offences.

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.