Crime

What crimes are

The Office for National Statistics publishes figures on the levels and trends of crime in England and Wales based on two sets of crime statistics, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime statistics, both of which are published every three months.

Each source has different strengths and limitations but together they provide a more comprehensive picture of crime.

Police forces have to supply the Home Office with crime statistics on ‘notifiable offences’ (all but the least serious offence categories). A complete list of offences recorded by the police in this way is provided in the Home Office’s user guide to crime statistics.

The main police recorded crime figures cover: violence against the person, sexual offences, robbery, theft, criminal damage, drugs, use of weapons and fraud. Detailed breakdowns (for instance, burglary as a type of theft) are also available.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales asks representative samples of the population about crimes they have experienced in the previous 12 months. It only covers crimes committed against individuals and their property and doesn’t cover all types of crime that people can experience. Its crime categories are designed to match, as far as possible, the categories used in police statistics. The Home Office user guide contains a complete list of offences measured by the crime survey.

How many crimes are committed

Each crime statistics release contains the total number of notifiable offences recorded by the police and the estimated number of Crime Survey crimes occurring in the same period.

Crime statistics recorded by the police have been collated since the nineteenth century and are published separately on the Home Office website. Methods of collating the statistics have changed from time to time. There were large changes in the period from 1998 to 2003, introducing discontinuities in the series.

Estimates of crime from the Crime Survey date back to 1981. There have been minor changes to methodology but these do not rule out comparisons over time.

In addition, each crime statistics release from the ONS provides specific analyses of certain aspects of crime, including: property crime, anti-social behaviour, violent crime and sexual offences, and public perceptions of policing.

Crimes are recorded by the police in the year that they come to light, and not in the year that they are committed, and very occasionally this can create a misleading trend. For instance, Dr Harold Shipman’s 172 homicides were all recorded by the police in 2002/03, leading to a massive spike in homicides recorded for this year. This says more about the recording methods than it does about 2002/03.

How crimes are committed

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes separate information on the nature of crime on an annual basis. This data provides more detail on how crimes such as burglary, vehicle theft, theft from the person, vandalism and violent crime actually happen (for instance, whether a burglary involved a loss for the person burgled).

Victims of crime

While crime figures recorded by the police focus on the offences committed, the victims’ perspective also needs to be taken into account.

Figures from the crime survey that show the likelihood of becoming a victim of different sorts of crime are published in the main tables of each quarterly crime statistics release. The statistics are broken down by all sorts of personal characteristics, including: someone’s age, sex, occupation, qualification, disability, ethnicity, marital status and even how often they visit bars or nightclubs.

Perceptions of crime

People’s perceptions of crime are measured by the crime survey and published on an annual basis. Tables provided alongside the crime statistics release show how people perceive crime levels to be changing over time and how likely they think they are to be victims of crime. There is also information on people’s worries about crime, as well as their views of the police, local council and the criminal justice system.

Violent crime and sexual offences

Some crimes are harder to measure than others. People are often sensitive to reporting intimate violence and sexual offences to the police. This means that police recorded crime data doesn’t do justice to these offences, and a large proportion go underreported.

It can even be daunting to tell interviewers about crimes of this sort in a face-to-face interview. Because of this, the crime survey has a self-completion module where victims fill in forms on the interviewer’s laptop, without the interviewer being able to see their responses.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes details on the nature and figures for violent crime, domestic violence and violent crime more generally in a dedicated release.

The crime survey also captures some of the emotional impacts of violence – at least as far as respondents to a survey supply relevant information. The nature of crime statistics is published on an annual basis alongside the ONS’s crime statistics release.

Homicides

Homicides (which include murder, manslaughter and infanticide) are recorded not only in the regular crime statistics but also on a separate database called the Home Office Homicide Index. The index records the number and details of each homicide recorded in England and Wales since 1977.

Analysis of the Homicide Index is published as part of the violent crime and sexual offences release.

Crimes are recorded by the police in the year that they come to light, and not in the year that they are committed, and very occasionally this can create a misleading trend. For instance, Dr Harold Shipman’s 172 homicides were all recorded by the police in 2002/03, leading to a massive spike in homicides recorded for this year. This says more about the recording methods than it does about 2002/03.

Solving crime

‘Detected’ crimes aren’t necessarily ‘solved’ in the sense that the offender is convicted and punished. They refer to the number of offences that have been ‘cleared up’ by the police. Not every case where the police know, or think they know, who committed a crime can be counted as a detection and some crimes are counted as detected when the victim might view the case as far from solved. For example, cases that result in acquittals at court are still counted by the police as detections.

The detection rate is the number of detections recorded as a proportion of the total number of crimes reported. There are two types of detection:

‘Sanction detections’ are offences that have been cleared up resulting in a formal sanction such as: a charge, a court summons, a caution, a penalty notice for disorder (most often used for anti-social behaviour and low-level crimes), court involvement or a warning for cannabis possession.

‘Non-sanction detections’ are those where no further action is taken against an offender for a variety of reasons.

Crime detections are published in a dedicated release by the Home Office.

Detection rates aren’t an adequate measure for how well the police are performing because some forces are more proactive in policing some types of crime, and it might be that alternative means to formal sanctions are being used more often.