Britain has a strange crime problem. According to the statistics, much of it is getting better. According to the public, almost everything is getting worse.
A new study from the Policy Institute at King’s College London has found that Britons dramatically overestimate the scale of crime and routinely get its direction of travel wrong. The median estimate of the proportion of people experiencing crime in England and Wales in 2024-25 was 27 percent. The actual figure was 9.7 percent.
The mistakes continue down the list. Eighty-three percent thought mobile phone theft had increased since 2010, when it has actually fallen by about 70 percent. Majorities believed domestic burglary and vehicle theft had risen, although both have fallen by roughly half. Only shoplifting among the five offences tested had substantially increased over that period—by about 70 percent—and that was the one the public got right.
Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the King’s Policy Institute, puts it bluntly: “The public are very wrong about crime.” But that is not quite the end of the story.
The latest official figures are more complicated than the headline ‘Crime is falling’ suggests. The Office for National Statistics stresses that the Crime Survey for England and Wales and police-recorded crime measure different things and have different strengths. The survey is particularly useful for long-term trends, while police data are preferred for offences such as homicide, robbery and weapons offences.
Nor is every category falling. Shoplifting has risen sharply over the longer term, even though the latest figures show a fall. Fraud and computer misuse remain enormous problems. Anti-social behaviour continues to shape how people experience their neighbourhoods.
There is also a more prosaic version of the unease. Stories abound of apparently respectable men and women walking into shops, filling bags with expensive bottles of wine and other goods, and simply walking out without paying. Staff may know what is happening but hesitate to intervene, fearing confrontation or violence.
The British Retail Consortium recorded about 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against shop-workers every day in 2024-25, although that was itself a 20 percent fall.
And there is another question that the King’s study does not answer: has the nature of British crime changed even as conventional crime has declined?
The old British gangland had recognisable geography and recognisable characters. It lived in pubs, clubs, betting shops and East End streets. Today’s organised crime can be harder to see. The National Crime Agency says the overall threat from serious and organised crime increased last year, with technology transforming the scale and reach of criminal activity and criminal markets increasingly converging. The gangland has not necessarily disappeared. It may have changed its clothes.
Drugs, fraud, people-smuggling, cybercrime and illicit finance cross borders with an ease the Kray brothers, Britain's notorious gangsters, could scarcely have imagined. The NCA says global criminal groups are increasingly diversifying and collaborating, while technological change is reducing barriers to offending.
This is where London becomes important. Talk to people in parts of east London and you will hear claims that the old local gangland has been replaced by Albanian, Russian and other international networks.
Those claims need testing rather than simply repeating. But the broader phenomenon is real: organised crime is increasingly international, networked and technologically enabled. And it is not confined to deprived neighbourhoods. London’s enormous legitimate economy, property market and financial system can provide opportunities for criminal money to mingle with respectable wealth. The modern gangland may be less visible precisely because it can operate behind legitimate businesses, property and international financial transactions.
Then there is the question of trust. The King’s study found that 35 percent of the public have no confidence at all in the government’s ability to deal with crime. Among people who wrongly believe murder has increased, the figure rises to 48 percent. Sixty-five percent expect crime to rise nationally over the next three years, although only 40 percent expect it to rise in their own area.
That distinction is revealing. People may feel that Britain is becoming more dangerous even when their own street does not feel that way.
Duffy believes psychology and information interact. “We have a deep negativity bias that tunes us to threat, and a rosy view of the past that makes us assume things were safer in the past than they were.” He adds that when people give inflated estimates of crime, “they're sending a message about what worries them”.
This is where Britain’s increasingly bitter arguments about immigration, race, policing and ‘two-tier justice’ enter the picture. King’s found that 52 percent believe ethnic or religious minorities are sentenced differently for crimes from others. Misperceptions about the nationality and ethnicity of offenders are particularly pronounced among Reform UK supporters.
None of this means that people should be told their fears are imaginary. Perception is not evidence of a crime wave, but neither is it irrelevant. It tells us something about the society in which people believe they are living.
Britain may therefore be facing two different crime stories at once. The first is measurable: many traditional crimes have fallen substantially. The second is psychological and social: people have become less confident that the police, politicians, courts and media are telling them the truth about what is happening around them. That loss of trust matters.
As Duffy puts it, “these beliefs are as much about identity and emotion as information”. The uncomfortable conclusion is that Britain may not be getting more criminal. It may be getting less certain about what crime is, who commits it, where it happens—and whom to believe.
That, rather than a simple rise or fall in the crime statistics, may be the more important story.
Shyam Bhatia | Senior journalist based in London and author of The Quiet Correspondent
(Views are personal)