Some serious crime investigations are surprisingly quick: half of murder prosecutions involve a suspect being charged in five days or fewer. But for many serious crimes, justice is often slow: half of fraud prosecutions don’t conclude until almost two years after the crime occurred.

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Data source: Ministry of Justice, 2019

Once police have enough evidence to prosecute an offender, they or prosecutors must decide whether to send the case to court or deal with it informally. For violent crimes, the likelihood of a case going to court varies substantially across police forces, with some prosecuting over 80% of cases and others diverting two thirds to other resolutions such as paying compensation. larger image | annotated R code to produce this chart

The government recently doubled the maximum sentence for assaulting a police officer to 12 months in prison, introducing a new offence of assaulting an emergency worker. So far, this change is associated with only small increases in sentences handed down in court. larger image | annotated R code to produce this chart Data source: Ministry of Justice, 2020 Notes To test whether there were any differences between imprisonment probability or sentence length before and after the new law was introduced, I ran separate ARIMA regression models (using the auto.

While Turkey has Europe’s highest imprisonment rate, England and Wales locks up more people per 100,000 population than any other western European country.

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Data source: Eurostat, 2019 database tables crim_pris_cap.

Of the 10.9 million crimes which individual adults aged 16 years and over experienced in the past year, only 27% were reported to the authorities. Reporting rates vary substantially, with more-serious crimes more likely to be reported. Fraud makes up almost half of victim-based crime but is particularly unlikely to be reported, dragging down the overall average.

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Data source: Crime Survey for England and Wales, 2019