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Number of crimes in England, Wales nears 12 mln: ONS

Xinhua, January 20, 2017 Adjust font size:

Crimes are being committed in England and Wales at the rate of 32,000 every day, a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed Thursday.

ONS says headline figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed there were an estimated 6.2 million incidents of crime in year ending September 2016.

Following an extension of the coverage of the survey, it was revealed there were 3.6 million fraud and 2.0 million computer misuse offences for the first full year in which such questions have been included in crime survey.

The inclusion of the new offences, says ONS, yields a new headline estimate of 11.8 million incidents of crime covered by the survey. That adds up to the equivalent of more than 32,000 crime reports every day in England and Wales.

ONS said the trend data on frauds referred to the police showed an annual rise of 3 percent. Other industry data on financial fraud, the vast bulk of which is unreported to the police, showed there were 1.9 million cases of frauds on British-issued cards, an increase of 39 percent from the previous year.

Across all crime types covered, the police recorded 4.7 million offences in the year ending September 2016, an annual rise of 8 percent.

Police forces recorded an annual rise of 22 percent in violence against the person offences. The increase was largely driven by changes in recording processes and the inclusion of additional harassment offences in the category.

ONS said the latest decrease in theft offences, shows they are now at the lowest level since records began in 1981, and down 69 percent compared to a peak in 1995.

In the year ending September 2016, the 3.6 million theft offences accounted for just under a third (30 percent) of all crime survey incidents, including fraud and computer misuse. Endit