Ask people what crime they worry about and they will usually say burglary, mugging, having the car stolen. Ask the data what crime actually happens, and you get a very different picture. We took millions of street-level police crime reports and sorted them by category to see what the everyday reality of crime in Britain looks like. The mix is genuinely surprising.
The Data
The figures here come from the open street-level crime data published by police forces across England and Wales, covering the most recent months available. We have grouped every report by its official category and worked out the share of the total each one represents. A note on method: this is a breakdown of the proportion of crime by type, not a headcount of total offences, because street-level data is published in a way that makes a clean national total unreliable. The relative size of each category, however, is solid, and it tells a clear story.
The Breakdown
Here is how recorded crime divides up by type.
| Crime type | Share of all reports |
|---|---|
| Violence and sexual offences | 36% |
| Anti-social behaviour | 15% |
| Shoplifting | 10% |
| Criminal damage and arson | 7% |
| Public order | 7% |
| Other theft | 6% |
| Vehicle crime | 5% |
| Drugs | 4% |
| Burglary | 3% |
| Robbery | 1% |
The single biggest category, by a wide margin, is violence and sexual offences, which makes up more than a third of everything reported. Anti-social behaviour is second. Together those two account for half of all crime reports. Meanwhile the crimes people fear most, burglary and robbery, sit right at the bottom, making up only about four percent of the total between them.
What "Violent Crime" Really Means
Before that 36 percent figure alarms you, it needs unpacking. The police category "violence and sexual offences" is extremely broad. It includes serious assault, yes, but also common assault with no injury, harassment, stalking, and threats. A great deal of it is not the stranger attack people picture but incidents between people who know each other, reported and recorded in far greater numbers than they once were. Part of the reason this category has grown is simply that more of these offences are now reported and logged, which is, in its way, a sign of the system working rather than the streets becoming lawless.
The Rise of Shoplifting
The number that has changed the most in recent years is shoplifting, now the third most common crime type at around one in ten reports. For a long time shoplifting was treated as a minor nuisance and barely registered in these rankings. The cost-of-living squeeze, organised theft-to-order gangs and a sense among some offenders that low-value theft would not be pursued have pushed it sharply up the table. Retailers have been warning about it for years, and the data now reflects what shopkeepers have been saying: theft from shops has become one of the defining crimes of the era.
Fear Versus Fact
The real value of a breakdown like this is in the gap it exposes between fear and fact. We fortify our homes against burglars and worry about muggers, yet those crimes are statistically rare. The crime we are far more likely to encounter is a confrontation, an act of anti-social behaviour, or theft from a shop. None of that makes the serious crimes any less serious, but it does suggest our instincts about danger are calibrated to the wrong threats. The everyday texture of crime in Britain is less burglar-at-the-window and more friction, disorder and theft in plain sight.
You can explore the area behind any postcode, including the towns and neighbourhoods around it, through our postcode directory.