Total police recorded crime increased by 3 per cent for the year ending March 2020 in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
That excludes Greater Manchester Police, due to ‘issues’ with GMP’s IT. The difference in trend to the CSEW (Crime Survey of England and Wales) is because rises in total police recorded crime were largely driven by increases in high-volume offence categories including fraud and computer misuse (12pc), violence against the person (7pc), particularly violence without injury (9pc), and stalking and harassment (12pc). Trends in these offence types are better measured by the CSEW, the annual crime survey of England and Wales, because the ONS regards police recorded crime data as not a reliable measure of all crime according to the ONS’s standards.
As the official statisticians say, many of the lower-volume, higher-harm types of violence tend to be in metropolitan areas such as London, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire.
The ONS’s latest CSEW figures are based on interviews between April 2019 and the first two weeks of March, measuring people’s experiences of crime in the 12 months before the interview month. Fieldwork for the year to March 2020 was suspended two weeks early, on Wednesday, March 18, due to the lockdown restrictions. Hence the data so far do not cover pandemic experiences.
According to BikeRegister, a UK cycle database, June saw a significant rise in bike theft reported – of 786 thefts, or 48 per cent more than in the same month last year. That contrasts with falls compared with 2019 the previous three months in 2020, during lockdown; April seeing the largest fall, down 24.5pc on last year to 376 thefts. BikeRegister’s Managing Director James Brown said: “Thieves will have struggled to commit crimes during lockdown due to the restrictions that were in place. However, as these restrictions are starting to ease and people are moving around more, criminals are facing an easier task, and they have the bonus of being able to target the thousands of new bikes bought during the last few months.”
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Sophie Sanders from the ONS’s Centre for Crime and Justice said: “Overall crime rates were lower in the months leading up to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, than they were in early 2019. However, it will not be possible to say whether this would have come to represent a change from the trend in recent years, as the pandemic will have had an impact on the level and types of crime since March. Next month we will be publishing the first analysis of crime statistics affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
“In contrast, prior to lockdown, we saw police recorded crime increase. This has been driven, largely, by a rise in high-volume offences including violence without injury, stalking and harassment, and fraud and computer misuse, which, apart from the latter, have been influenced by improvements in recording practices. There are also different patterns for specific crimes. For instance, theft from the person increased but burglary decreased.”
For Labour, Sarah Jones, Shadow Minister for Policing and Fire, said that the rises in violence were deeply worrying. She said: “The nature of lockdown means there’s likely to be a fall in some types of violence, although worryingly not in areas such as domestic abuse. However, none of the issues that drive violence on our streets have been addressed and the economic fallout is likely to make many of them even worse.
“The government urgently need to provide the funding so the officers they have promised can be delivered, to try and help repair the terrible damage they have done to policing since 2010.”
Flavius Plesu, founder and CEO at OutThink says that the ONS’s latest stats show an alarming trend, with an overall fall in crime of 9pc, but ‘computer misuse’ or cybercrime is up by 23pc according to joint National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) by Action Fraud data, with ‘hacking social media and emails’ – social engineering – seeing a 55pc rise, which is tucked away towards the bottom of the report. “Although cybercrime can often seem quite abstract, these stats show the very real shift in criminal activity from the physical world towards cyber. The days of mob bosses shaking down the local greengrocer are over – we are now seeing organised criminals targeting enterprises armed with a laptop. Just look at yesterday’s Twitter breach as an example.
“For enterprises, this 55pc rise in social engineering should be a stark reminder that although CISOs have generally done a great job of securing their tech and finessing processes, the people component of their security posture is still lagging behind. Addressing this area is very difficult to do, especially with the obvious limitations of security awareness training. But we must do more to get under the skin of human risk and to really understand it. This starts with identifying, measuring, quantifying and ultimately managing it, but without this deeper knowledge of human risk, we can’t even begin to address the industry’s ‘people problem’.”
Likewise George Glass, Head of Threat Intel at Redscan said the latest figures painted an inaccurate picture of computer misuse and online fraud cases in the UK. “Action Fraud, the source of the statistics, has been branded not fit for purpose for its failures to review reports from scam victims. This is the reason that the reporting system has now been overtaken by the NCSC [National Cyber Security Centre]. You only need to look at the huge of reports of COVID-19 related scams to know that the situation is far worse than represented by these latest statistics.”
West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) David Jamieson said he continued to have concerns about the increase in violent crime, nationally and in his region. He said: “These statistics show crime is not falling across the country and they prove that the West Midlands is sadly not immune.
“COVID-19 has had an impact on crime with acquisitive crime falling over the lockdown period. However, reports of domestic abuse have risen throughout the lockdown period. I have led on a multi-agency campaign to encourage those who are suffering from domestic abuse to contact the police or other services so they can get the help they need.
“The government seems to be finally acknowledging that its cuts to policing have gone too far, but it still hasn’t pledged to increase police budgets in the long-term.
“These statistics are a wake-up call for the government to ensure that our police forces are adequately funded. Since 2010, due to cuts in government funding West Midlands Police has lost over 2,200 police officers. Under government plans West Midlands Police are only due to get half the number of those officers back by 2023.”
