People living in England and Wales are much less likely to be victims of theft than in the 1990s

Several data sources show that theft in England and Wales has declined in recent decades.

One of those is police records — but they only capture *reported *crimes, and many people don’t report thefts. So it’s also important to draw on a second data source. The data we show here comes from reports based on face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of the population. In these interviews, the public is asked about their personal experiences of crimes in the previous 12 months.

On this chart, we’ve broken down the numbers by four different types of theft.

You can see a dramatic drop in vehicle-related thefts. These peaked in 1995, with an estimated 4.3 million incidents in England and Wales. While some of these incidents involved the actual stealing of a vehicle, many were either attempted break-ins or the theft of specific components, such as radios.

Burglaries — which involve someone breaking into a building to steal — also peaked in the mid-1990s.

Both types of incidents have decreased by more than 80% since then.

Pickpocketing or “snatching” has been more persistent. These crimes have decreased slightly from the 1990s and early 2000s, but have also experienced an increase in recent years.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “People living in England and Wales are much less likely to be victims of theft than in the 1990s” by Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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