Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2021-2022

Total Recorded Offences

Note: Due to comparability issues, it is not possible to compare data with years prior to 2013-14.

The groups which make up total recorded offences have been greatly impacted by the new crime grouping structure, used for the first time in this year’s bulletin. Both Common assault and Stalking have been transferred to the Non-sexual crimes of violence group, and as such no longer contribute to the total for recorded offences. The remaining offence types within the Miscellaneous offences group have been split into two groups: Antisocial offences and Miscellaneous offences. The Motor vehicle offences group is renamed to Road traffic offences, but otherwise sees very limited change. As noted at the start of this bulletin, these changes have been back-revised within the statistics to maintain time series analysis.

The total number of offences recorded has fallen by over half (59%) since 2013-14, including a 3% decrease from 187,233 in 2020-21 to 180,913 in 2021-22.

Due to anomalies in the data for Road traffic offences, statistics for total recorded offences by the police are only comparable from 2013-14 onwards. The Scottish Government produced a Technical Report in 2014 which detailed the quality assurance work carried out in reaching this conclusion. Further detail on these anomalies can be found later in this section and in Annex 2.

In 2021-22, of all recorded offences:

• Road traffic offences accounted for just over three fifths (62%)
• Antisocial offences accounted for just under a third (31%)
• Miscellaneous offences accounted for 7%

It should be noted that the number of offences recorded by the police generally tends to be affected to a greater extent by police activity and operational decisions than the number of crimes.