The vast majority of violent and sexual offences reported to police forces in England and Wales go unsolved, with some neighbourhoods seeing no serious crimes solved whatsoever, analysis of UK crime data shows.
The latest available data, which runs the year to June 2024, shows only one-in-ten serious violent and sexual crimes including grievous bodily harm, sexual assault, and rape end with a suspect being caught or charged, a report states. Some 89 per cent of all offences are ‘closed’ without an outcome by police in England and Wales, and faith in police to do their job is so low an increasing number of victims give up and withdraw from investigations, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper states.
The publication used crime data to build a picture of police effectiveness across the UK home nations England and Wales — Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own national police forces — and states the number of crimes not resolved by police was close to 1.9 million in the year to June 2024. Astonishingly, in 611 of the most violent neighbourhoods across the country where there is at least one violent or sexual crime every two weeks fewer than ten per cent of these alleged crimes are ever solved.
More shockingly still, in a small handful of those worst-performing areas in England and Wales, not a single violent or sexual crime had been solved for months.
The Guardian also found considerably fewer crimes are solved in big urban areas with lots of crime. In Rural areas, violent and sexual crime is more likely to be solved, even though the vast majority of cases in both types of locations, the majority of crimes are never solved. The paper notes Labour politician Yvette Cooper has spoken out against the “postcode lottery” of divergent results in policing, however a lottery at least implies there are some winners. And as these statistics clearly show, everyone across the country is let down by the police, with the only differentiation being just how bad the statistics are.
Headlines revealing that police functionally do not solve any crimes in large swathes of the country are becoming more familiar in the United Kingdom. That almost every violent or sexual crime goes unsolved across much of England and Wales follows by months the revelation that in many areas, police generally never solve burglaries either.
An analysis of crime figures published in March 2024 stated “Police have failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales in the past three years”, The Daily Telegraph found. Incredibly, just four per cent of burglaries result in a charge being made.
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