UK levels of crime fall during 2017 - ONS
Levels of reported crime continued to fall throughout 2017, consistent with a general trend seen since the mid-1990s, according to a research report released by the Office of National Statistics on Thursday.
However, the ONS highlighted the fact that, as the new figures covered a "broad range of offence types", not all offences had seen declines.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) revealed that many of the high-volume crimes, such as lower harm violent crime, criminal damage and most types of theft, were at a level either consistent with the previous year or lower, and also showed that crime was a seemingly less common experience for most Britons, with just 20% of those surveyed claiming to have been a victim of crime at some point.
One of the largest contributions to the decline in estimated crime to come from the CSEW was in fraud and computer misuse offences, where year-on-year comparisons showed a fall of 15%.
While statisticians point towards the long-running trend of offending as measured by the Crime Survey of England and Wales continues to fall, the police recorded figures showed a different side, but again, the the ONS noted that police recorded crime statistics need be taken with a grain of salt as the police can only record crimes that are brought to their attention and with categories such as knife crime and gun crime being relatively well-recorded by the police, the data cannot always provide a reliable measure of trends.
This was most evident in the relatively low volume offences such as knife crime, up 21% to a total of 37,443 recorded offences, and gun crime, up 20% to 6,694 recorded offences.
The offence "assault with injury and assault with intent to cause serious harm" made up a total of 50% of all selected offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, including homicide.
The total number of homicides recorded by the police fell by 1%, but recent incidents where there were multiple victims such as the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester were excluded in the latest figures, if included in the survey, Britain recorded a total of 57 more homicides than the previous year, a 10% rise up to a total of 650.
The occurrence of these offences tended to be disproportionately concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas.
Mark Bangs, crime statistician and analyst at the ONS, said: "These latest figures indicate that levels of crime have continued to fall compared with the previous year, but this picture varied across different types of crime and not all offence types showed falls."
"While overall levels of violent crime were not increasing, there is evidence of rises having occurred in some of the low incidences but more harmful categories such as knife and gun crime," he added.