Over the past five years, more than 1,400 people have been arrested on average each season for football-related offences across the top five English divisions, with incidents reported at over 1,000 different matches. Most arrests are for violence, and about half are for offences outside the grounds themselves. More fans are arrested at away games, even though far fewer fans typically travel than attend home games. However, the rate of arrests at football matches overall is low, at about 3 arrests per 100,000 match spectators.

Border Force is responsible for seizing drugs at ports, airports and international parcels depots. However, reports by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration suggest drug-detection efforts are hindered by understaffing, lack of training and focus on conducting passport checks on travellers. Most drug seizures are of small amounts: only 19% of seizures involve more than one kilogram of drugs. larger image | annotated R code to produce this chart

Police reported using force on over 300,000 occasions last year, or about 850 each day, with most incidents involving either handcuffing or other restraint. Almost all force used by police resulted in no injury to the person force was used against. When officers did injure people, the injuries were usually minor. However, since these are new statistics there is likely to be some under-reporting, especially of minor incidents. larger image | annotated R code to produce this chart

About 69,000 adults (more than 95% of them men) are currently serving prison sentences, most of them for violent or sexual offences. However, over 10,000 adults are serving sentences for drug offences, more than for all types of theft combined.

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Data source: Ministry of Justice, 2019

One way to understand crime-related demands on police forces is to track ‘crime pressure’, a measure of investigative workload representing the number of crimes reported to a force per officer, weighted according to Office for National Statistics estimates of the relative severity of different crimes. In the past five years, this measure has risen in every police force in England and Wales, and has doubled in many places. larger image | annotated R code to produce this chart