Official Statistics on Ethnicity and Crime

Last Updated on September 23, 2026 by Karl Thompson

This post sets out what the official statistics on ethnicity and crime in England and Wales actually show, using the most recent data available: the Ministry of Justice’s Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2024, published 27 November 2025, and the Home Office’s stop and search bulletin for the year ending 31 March 2025, published 6 November 2025.

The headline finding is that over-representation is real but not uniform across the system:

Scale of problem	Phase of CJS
Severe	Stop and search, remand, the prison population, and especially the under-18 prison population
Modest	Arrests, prosecutions, conviction rates, custody rates
Large but concentrated	Sentencing for drug offences

Two stages carry most of the disparity: police discretion at the entrance to the system, and the prison population at the exit. The middle is much closer to proportionate than most textbooks suggest. Building an essay around that shape is far more convincing than treating the whole system as uniformly discriminatory.

This post covers the ethnicity strand of the crime and deviance module, AQA Paper 3 (7192/3).

The pattern in outline

England and Wales population, 2021 Census: 82% White, 9% Asian, 4% Black, 3% Mixed, 2% Other.

Stage	White	Black	Asian	Mixed
Population (2021 Census)	82%	4%	9%	3%
Stop and search (2024/25)	70%	13%	11%	4%
Arrests (2024/25)	79%	7%	8%	4%
Prosecutions, indictable (2024)	83%	7%	6%	3%
Prison population (30 June 2025)	73%	12%	8%	5%

Read the Black column downwards: 4% of the population, 13% of searches, 7% of arrests, 7% of prosecutions, 12% of prisoners.

A note before going further. The MoJ states explicitly that these group-level differences cannot be read as evidence of bias, because offence mix, geography, age and prior record are not controlled for. That caveat is worth quoting in an essay — an official source warning against over-reading its own figures is a strong evaluation point.

Stop and search

Home Office, Police powers and procedures, year ending 31 March 2025.

There were 528,582 stop and searches — 65% below the 2009 peak of 1,519,561. Two-thirds ended in no further action, and 61% were for suspected drug possession.

Ethnic group	Search rate relative to White
Black	3.8×
Mixed	1.8×
Other	1.5×
Asian	1.4×

The disparity has fallen sharply. Any textbook quoting six or nine times is describing the situation before 2020.

Year ending March	Black : White search rate
2011	6.5×
2019	9.7×
2021	5.5×
2023	4.1×
2024	3.7×
2025	3.8×

Further detail:

• Black males aged 18–34: 125 searches per 1,000 population, against 24 per 1,000 for White males of the same age.
• Disparity by reason: section 60 “no suspicion” searches 8.8×, offensive weapons 7.2×, drugs 4.6×, criminal damage 1.3×.
• Ethnicity is unrecorded for 18% of searches, and missing more often for minority ethnic people. Using officer-observed ethnicity where self-defined is absent raises the Black figure to 4.9× — so 3.8 is probably an understatement.

Find rates: the most useful statistic in this topic

	Something found	Arrest followed
Searches of Black people	29.9%	16.7%
Searches of White people	28.4%	14.5%
Searches of Asian people	—	13.6%

Near-identical find rates alongside a near-fourfold difference in search rates. If the extra searches were being made on better grounds, they would find more. They do not.

Pair this with section 60: the power requiring no reasonable suspicion produces the largest disparity (8.8×) and the lowest arrest rate (3.6%, against 15.0% for ordinary PACE searches).

Arrests, prosecution and conviction

Here the gaps are smaller than students expect, and saying so accurately is worth marks.

• Arrests (2024/25): Black people were 7% of arrests against 4% of the population — roughly 1.75× over-represented. The MoJ describes the overall arrest profile as broadly in line with the population.
• Prosecutions for indictable offences (2024): 83% White, 7% Black, 6% Asian, 3% Mixed. Convictions follow almost identical proportions.

Custody rate

Ethnic group	Custody rate, indictable offences (2024)
White	33%
Black	35%
Asian	37%
Other	39%

Overall 34%. The gap is small.

Using the Relative Rate Index — the measure the Lammy Review recommended and the MoJ now uses — Black defendants were 10% more likely than White defendants to receive immediate custody, Asian 9%, Other 17%. All statistically significant, all inside the MoJ’s “zone of tolerance” of 0.8 to 1.25.

The exception: drug offences

Ethnic group	More likely than White offenders to receive custody for a drug offence
Other	89%
Asian	58%
Black	44%
Mixed	26%

These are the only differences the MoJ classes as both statistically and practically significant.

This deserves an analysis paragraph. Drugs are the reason for 61% of stop and searches, and drugs are the one offence group where sentencing disparity is unambiguous. The same offence category drives the disparity at both ends of the system.

Remand, guilty pleas and sentence length

• Custodial remand at magistrates’ courts (2024): 23% of White defendants, 30% Black, 31% Other.
• Across all courts, the Other group were 33% more likely to be remanded than White defendants, Black 29%, Mixed 22%, Asian 19%.

Ethnic group	Average custodial sentence length (2024)
White	18.4 months
Other	22.2 months
Mixed	22.9 months
Black	28.6 months
Asian	32.2 months

That table looks damning, and students routinely use it as proof of sentencing discrimination. It needs qualifying. When the MoJ ran a regression controlling for offence type, age, sex, plea and court, there was no statistically significant association between ethnicity and sentence length for indictable offences overall. The raw gap is largely explained by offence mix and by plea.

Guilty pleas are the mechanism

Ethnic group	Crown Court guilty plea rate (2024)
White	63%
Mixed	61%
Other	56%
Asian	55%
Black	54%

Black defendants were 15% less likely to plead guilty. A guilty plea attracts a discount of up to a third, so a lower plea rate feeds directly into longer average sentences — without any judge treating anyone differently.

The Lammy Review’s explanation is a trust deficit: BAME defendants plead not guilty more often because they do not expect fair treatment, and prefer their chances with a jury to a magistrate. That locates the discrimination upstream of the courtroom.

Consequences are measurable. Black defendants waited a median 24.9 weeks for Crown Court trial against 17.0 weeks for White defendants, and 243 days from charge to completion against 150 days.

Prison

• The prison population was 87,334 on 30 June 2025. Of prisoners whose ethnicity was known: 73% White, 12% Black, 8% Asian, 5% Mixed, 3% Other.
• Black people are therefore about three times over-represented — 4% of the population, 12% of prisoners.

The disparity is far worse for children.

Group	Black share
Prison population overall	12%
Prisoners aged 18–24	21%
Prisoners aged under 18	25%

59% of prisoners under 18 are from minority ethnic groups. By contrast, 84% of prisoners aged 50 and over are White.

Black prisoners also serve the largest share of their determinate sentence in custody (62% in 2024); Asian prisoners the smallest (53%).

HM Inspectorate of Prisons found 75% of White male prisoners said staff treated them with respect, against 64–67% of male prisoners from minority ethnic groups. 45% of Black male prisoners reported victimisation by staff, against 30% of White prisoners.

Do the statistics measure offending, or policing?

This is the question every exam answer turns on. Three kinds of evidence bear on it.

Self-report studies

Self-report studies ask people what they have done rather than what they were caught doing, so they bypass police discretion entirely.

Graham and Bowling (1995) found near-identical self-reported offending rates for Black (43%) and White (44%) respondents, with lower rates for Indian (30%), Pakistani (28%) and Bangladeshi (13%) respondents.

The study is thirty years old, and you should say so. But it remains the classic reference, and the finding — no meaningful Black/White difference in self-reported offending — is what makes the official statistics look like a policing artefact rather than an offending pattern.

Sharp and Budd (2005), using the 2003 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey of around 12,000 people, found White and Mixed respondents most likely to report offending, ahead of Black (28%) and Asian (21%) respondents.

Evaluate these properly. Self-report studies depend on honesty, cover mostly minor offences, and sample young people living in households — so they miss the most serious offending and the most excluded people.

Victim surveys

Victim surveys ask people about crimes committed against them, including what they could tell about the offender. Because the information comes from victims rather than police, it is not directly shaped by police discretion.

This is the strongest evidence for the view that some of the difference is real — left realists rely on it heavily.

Its limits matter too. Most offences produce no usable offender description at all. Victim perception is itself subject to stereotyping. And victim surveys only capture offences with a direct personal victim, so they say nothing about drug offences — the single largest driver of disparity in this topic.

Ethnic minorities as victims

The specification expects victims as well as offenders, and most students forget it.

• CSEW 2024/25: 12.1% of Black people aged 16+ were victims of personal crime, against 10.9% of White and 8.8% of Asian people. The Black figure rose significantly from 9.2%.
• Homicide victimisation, three years to March 2024: 39.8 per million for Black victims against 8.5 for White — over four times higher.
• Around a third of Black homicide victims were under 21, against 14% of White victims.
• An estimated 145,000 racially motivated incidents in 2024/25.
• Counter-intuitive but worth using: 67% of Black and Asian people said they were confident the criminal justice system is effective, against 44% of White people. Confidence in effectiveness and experience of fair treatment are clearly not the same thing.

Two studies you need by name

Hood (1992), Race and Sentencing. Still the classic sentencing study. Examining Crown Court cases in the West Midlands and controlling for legally relevant factors, Hood found Black defendants had a five percentage point greater probability of being sent to prison than White defendants.

Note this carefully. The finding is five percentage points, not “five times more likely”. The “5×” version circulates widely in revision material and is wrong. Using it invites a marker who knows the study to discount the paragraph.

Waddington et al. (2004). The standard counter-argument on stop and search: comparing searches to the resident population uses the wrong denominator. What matters is the available population — who is actually on the street, in that area, at that time. On that measure much of the disproportion disappears in some areas.

A genuine methodological criticism and a strong AO3 point. It does not, however, explain the equal find rates or the section 60 pattern.

Evaluation

✓ The statistics reflect how the system operates	✗ The statistics reflect real differences in offending
3.8× search disparity with no better find rate (29.9% v 28.4%) — the extra searches detect no extra crime	The custody rate barely differs (33% White, 35% Black), and MoJ regression finds no ethnicity effect on sentence length overall
Self-report studies find little Black/White difference in offending (Graham and Bowling, 1995)	Victim survey evidence is not shaped by police discretion and supports some real difference
Section 60 — the power needing no suspicion — has the highest disparity (8.8×) and lowest arrest rate (3.6%)	Waddington et al. (2004): the resident population is the wrong denominator
Black defendants 29% more likely to be remanded; 24.9 weeks to trial against 17.0	Arrest proportions are close to population proportions
Black children are 25% of the under-18 prison population against 4% of the population	The disparity has fallen from 9.7× to 3.8× since 2018/19
Three official inquiries have found institutional racism: Macpherson, Lammy, Casey	Left realists argue deprivation causes some real difference in offending
	The MoJ states its own figures cannot demonstrate bias; ethnicity is unknown for 18% of search and a third of court records

Exam pointers

• The question is nearly always a version of “are the differences real, or produced by the criminal justice system?” The strongest answer: partly both, and the balance differs by stage.
• Use the equal find rate. It is the single most efficient piece of evidence in the topic and almost no candidate has it.
• Date every statistic and name the source.
• If you use Hood, use five percentage points. If you use stop and search, use 3.8×.
• The MoJ’s own caveat is a strong AO3 move because it evaluates the evidence rather than the theory.

For a worked 30-mark answer see evaluate the view that differences in crime rates between ethnic groups are mainly the result of the way the criminal justice system operates.

Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, you might like my Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle — 32 pages of revision notes, seven colour mind maps and 12 exam practice questions with exemplar answers, written for the AQA specification.

Better value is the A-Level Sociology Revision Mega Bundle.

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, Paper 3 (7192/3).

For the argument that the police are institutionally racist, see are the police institutionally racist?

The explanations: left realism, cultural factors, Policing the Crisis and Paul Gilroy.

For exam practice see ethnicity and crime short answer questions.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

Ministry of Justice (2025) Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2024, published 27 November 2025.

Home Office (2025) Police powers and procedures: stop and search, arrests and mental health detentions, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2025, published 6 November 2025.

Office for National Statistics, Census 2021; Crime Survey for England and Wales, year ending March 2025.

Graham, J. and Bowling, B. (1995) Young People and Crime, Home Office Research Study 145.

Sharp, C. and Budd, T. (2005) Minority Ethnic Groups and Crime, Home Office Online Report 33/05.

Hood, R. (1992) Race and Sentencing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Waddington, P.A.J., Stenson, K. and Don, D. (2004) ‘In Proportion: Race, and Police Stop and Search’, British Journal of Criminology, 44(6).