Crime overview: year ending December 2017

Crimes against households, adults, children, businesses and society in England and Wales.

This page is part of the latest crime collection

Release date: 26 April 2018

Release frequency: Quarterly

Next release: September 2018 (provisional)

Crime overall has fallen in the last year

Crime estimated by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) shows crime overall has fallen in the last year, driven by a 28% decline in computer misuse.

Most individual types of crime, including violence, have stayed at levels similar to the previous year.

When looking at the main types of crime, changes were only seen in:

  • computer misuse offences (28% decrease to 1.37 million offences), which drove the fall in overall CSEW crime
  • vehicle-related thefts (17% increase to 929,000 offences)

The increase in vehicle-related thefts is supported by a 16% increase in vehicle offences recorded by the police to 452,683 offences; a category that is well reported to the police and thought to be well recorded.

All other main types of crime measured by the survey showed no change.

Police recorded rises in knife and gun crime, mainly in large cities

Police recorded crime data showed evidence of rises in some other categories of crime, particularly the more harmful, less frequently-occurring offences.

Police recorded crime data are not designated as National Statistics. This data can be affected by changes in policing practices and victims’ willingness to report crime.

The police figures indicate rises in the following types of crime:

  • offences involving knives or sharp instrument (up 22% to 39,598 recorded offences)
  • offences involving firearms (up 11% to 6,604 recorded offences)

These offences tend to be disproportionately concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas; however, the majority of police force areas saw rises in these types of violent crime.

More homicides, burglaries and robberies reported

Latest police recorded figures showed rises in:

  • burglary, which increased by 9% (up to 438,971 offences)
  • robbery (up 33% to 74,130 offences)
  • homicides (up 9% to 653 offences)

Police recorded crime data are not designated as National Statistics. This data can be affected by changes in policing practices and victims’ willingness to report crime.

Latest police recorded figures show a 9% increase on the previous year.

This continues an upward trend seen in homicides since March 2014, indicating a change to the long-term fall seen in the previous decade.

These figures exclude the London and Manchester terrorist attacks in 2017. They also exclude the 96 cases of manslaughter from the Hillsborough disaster which were recorded in 2016.

Although the deaths at Hillsborough occurred in 1989, an inquest returned a verdict of manslaughter and therefore was recorded as a homicide in the year 2016.

Likelihood of being a victim has fallen considerably

Around 4 in 10 adults were estimated to have been a victim of crime in 1995; before the survey included fraud and computer misuse in its coverage.

In the year ending December 2017, just over 1 in 10 adults were a victim of crimes comparable with those measured in the 1995 survey.

Including fraud and computer misuse, 2 in 10 adults were a victim of crime in the year ending December 2017.

Crime data

This page mainly reports on data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime.

View all data

More information on both these sources can be found in the User guide to crime statistics for England and Wales.

Using crime data

More pages in this collection

More about crime

Contact us

Mark Bangs
crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk
+44 (0)2075 928689

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