Last Updated on November 29, 2019 by Karl Thompson
189 police officers have been convicted across 12 police forces in England in Wales in five years since 2013 , according to a recent FOI request (source: The Telegraph). This equates to just 37.8 police officer convictions each year.
According to Full Fact, there were 126, 300 total police officers in England and Wales in March 2019.
This gives us a police officer conviction rate of 0.03% per year – that is to say that 0.03% of police officers are convicted of a crime each year.
1.38 million people in the general population were prosecuted in the year (CJS Stats, 2018)
A very rough estimate for the number of adults in England and Wales is around 50 million, so this gives us a rough adult conviction rate of 2.76 per year.
This means the Police officer conviction rate is 100 times less than that for the population as a whole.
How accurate are these statistics?
Personally I’m sceptical about the police officer conviction rate.
Despite the fact that the police probably are less likely to commit crime – I mean it kind of goes with the job, not committing crime, and then there’s the embarrassment of getting caught even if you are criminally inclined, which I imagine would be a further deterrent, I still think there’s a lot of criminal police officers whose crimes are just not getting detected.
I imagine you’d be less likely to be suspected of a crime – I mean the police themselves aren’t going to get stopped and searched are they?
Then there’s the fact that prosecutors might be more reluctant to prosecute police because it makes the system look flawed.
Then of course there’s all those things which won’t be defined as criminal because it’s the police doing them in the line of duty – such as speeding and violence, and drug possession come to think of it.
