As 2020 draws to a close, we take a look at Police.uk’s Peterborough crime statistics and analyse the trend of incidents across the city, paying particular attention to the effect of COVID.
As a whole, the number of reported incidents during 2020 is relatively unchanged with 26,294 reported crimes during the last 12 months vs 26,084 across an average three year period, resulting in a slight comparative increase of 0.81%.
Crime types, however, make for interesting reading:
Peterborough Crime by Type
According to data published on police.uk Drugs, public order offences and violence / sexual offices have seen a rapid rise of c.20% over the previous 12 months. The increase in drug offences is primarily attributed to Cambridgeshire Polices effort to combat county lines dealing and the effort by the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit to disrupt organised crime. As a result, this is not thought to show that drug offences have increased, but by use of better intelligence, the police can act accordingly. The rise in violence and sexual offences is thought to be domestic-related and attributed to the psychological impacts of people staying at home.
Bicycle theft has seen a reduction of 19.4%, vehicle crime is down 26% and shoplifting down 26.5%. It is thought that as Peterborough has been under sustained covid restrictions for much of 2020, this has reduced the theft of bicycles and vehicle crime away from home. Furthermore, with retail bearing the brunt of covid restrictions, this has undoubtedly reduced shoplifting.
Crime by outcome
Peterborough has seen a 15% reduction in “no suspect identified” outcomes meaning the police are improving their suspect identified stat. However, they have also seen an increase of “Unable to prosecute suspect” outcomes by 16% meaning either the threshold of charging a suspect is rising or Peterborough cannot meet the threshold as well as they used to.
The most notable figure is that 61% of all reported crimes across the city result in either no identified suspect, or insufficient evidence to satisfy the crown prosecution service that a crime has been committed.
In summary, despite the large swings of crime types, the level of crime in Peterborough is mostly unchanged.
