Official Criminal Statistics (AQA A Level Sociology): Revision Note

Statistics on crime

• Most of what we know about crime comes from official criminal statistics (OCS), which are published quarterly by the government

  • Police-recorded crime – offences reported to and logged by the police

  • Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) – a large-scale victimisation survey of around 47,000 randomly selected households

    • Captures crimes that may not be reported to the police

    • Participants aged 16 and over are asked about their experiences of different crimes in the 12 months prior to the interview

Crime patterns & trends

• Official Criminal Statistics (OCS) are used to show trends and patterns in crime

• They tell us about the:

  • volume of crime (how much there is and whether it is going up or down)

  • main types of crime being committed

  • social characteristics of people who are reported, arrested, or convicted

Volume of crime

• The CSEW headline estimate of crime rose by 7% in the year ending March 2025, compared to March 2024 — from 8.8 million to 9.4 million incidents

  • This increase was mainly due to fraud (+31%), while computer misuse fell by 32% (ONS, 2025)

• Police-recorded offences stayed almost the same: 6.6 million in March 2025 vs 6.7 million the year before (ONS, 2025)

Main types of crime

• Crimes against people, e.g., violence, robbery, and sexual offences

  • Knife crime: police records show a slight fall in 2025, after increases in the late 2010s (ONS, 2025)

• Crimes against property, e.g., theft, burglary, criminal damage

  • Property crime is much lower than in the mid-1990s: about 608,000 incidents in 2025 compared with 3.4 million in 1995 (ONS, 1995; 2025)

'Typical' social characteristics

• This means the characteristics that are most often seen among people recorded in official statistics

• It is important to remember these are patterns, not descriptions of every individual who commits a crime

  • Gender: In 2023/24, 84% of arrests were male and 16% female (ONS)

    • Men were around six times more likely to be arrested than women in 2022/23

  • Ethnicity: In 2022/23, Black people were 2.2 times more likely to be arrested than White people (20.4 vs 9.4 per 1,000)

    • Rates for Black men were 38.2 per 1,000 vs 16.0 for White men (ONS)

  • Age: Young adults are heavily represented in serious violence cases

  • Class and area: OCS suggest many offenders come from working-class backgrounds and urban areas

• Differences in arrest and conviction rates by sex, ethnicity, and class do not simply reflect who commits a crime

• The ONS warns that they are influenced by:

  • policing practices and priorities

  • where crime is concentrated

  • population structures (age, gender balance)

  • social and economic inequalities

Problems with the recording of crime

• Comparability issues

  • Changes in police recording practices and legal definitions make it difficult to compare crime over time

    • E.g., the counting rules for crime used by the police are subject to frequent change by the Home Office

    • E.g., in 2002, new offences such as stalking and hate crime were introduced, which suddenly increased recorded crime rates

• Exclusion of certain crimes

  • Some crimes never appear in the OCS because they are handled by other agencies

    • E.g., white-collar and corporate crimes are not included in the OCS because they are dealt with by civil agencies such as HMRC and the HSE

• Historical crimes

  • When old offences are pursued years later, they inflate the current figures

    • E.g., the crimes of Jimmy Savile were added to the 2014 statistics, even though they took place across 40 years.

• Under-reporting

  • Many crimes are never reported to the police, especially those seen as too minor, embarrassing, or private

    • E.g., victims of domestic abuse may stay silent out of fear of reprisals or not being believed

• Police discretion

  • Officers may decide not to record certain crimes, especially minor ones, to meet targets or save resources

    • E.g., bike theft might be downgraded or ignored as 'too trivial'

• Victimless crimes

  • Offences with no direct victim only appear in statistics if actively targeted by the police

    • E.g., drug possession is usually only recorded when police carry out stop-and-search or raids

• Political/organisational pressure

  • Forces may be influenced to record or present statistics in a way that meets targets or avoids criticism

    • E.g., crime league tables can encourage police to under-record offences to make detection rates look higher

Evaluating the usefulness of OCS

Strengths

• Positivist acceptance of validity

  • Positivists regard OCS as a valid and realistic picture of crime in the UK

  • Functionalists and subcultural theorists have used OCS to explain why some social groups appear more criminal than others

• Quantitative value

  • OCS provide regular, large-scale data, enabling analysis of long-term trends and patterns

  • They are valuable for designing crime prevention policies and targeting policing resources

• Left realist perspective

  • Left realists argue that although OCS are socially constructed, they are still useful because they highlight real inequalities in victimisation

  • They point out that statistics show working-class people and ethnic minorities are more likely to be victims as well as offenders, which cannot be ignored

Criticisms

• Interpretivists' challenge to validity

  • Interpretivists argue OCS reflect what the police and public choose to record/report, not the 'true' level of crime

  • They reveal police priorities and public attitudes more than actual offending behaviour

• The role of victims

  • Many crimes go unrecorded because victims don’t report them (e.g., due to fear, embarrassment, or mistrust of the police), creating a 'dark figure' of crime

  • Victims from vulnerable groups (e.g., women in abusive relationships or some BAME communities) may be particularly unlikely to report crime

• Labelling theory critique

  • Crime statistics are a social construction — they reflect the processes of labelling and selective law enforcement

  • Certain groups (young, working-class, and ethnic minorities) are stereotyped and policed more heavily, which inflates their representation in OCS

• Marxist critique

  • OCS serve ruling-class interests by focusing attention on street crime committed by the working class

  • They divert attention away from white-collar and corporate crime, which causes significant harm but is less visible in statistics

• Reliability problems

  • Changes in definitions, counting rules and recording practices (e.g., new offence categories) make comparisons over time unreliable

  • Sudden rises or falls may reflect administrative changes rather than real changes in crime