Police recorded a record number of sex offences last year (Image: PA)
Police recorded almost 200,000 sex crimes last year as the violence against women and girls epidemic continues.
Officers opened 199,445 investigations into sex offences in the year to September 2024, including nearly 70,000 rape probes.
Statisticians revealed both were record highs, heaping more pressure on ministers and police chiefs to end the crisis.
This is a staggering four-fold increase compared to 15 years ago, analysis has revealed.
Former Victims’ Commissioner Dame Vera Baird told the Daily Express: “These figures are extraordinary.
“But worse is that only one in six people report sex offences to the police so the epidemic is six times the size of these figures.
The police and CPS prosecute fewer than 3% of reported sex crimes, which means half a per cent of those that are committed even get to court, never mind a conviction.
“Women feel abandoned by the authorities and men are not being deterred. I said five years ago that rape had been de-criminalised and sickeningly it is on the increase.”
Ministers and police chiefs are under pressure to end the violence epidemic against women (Image: PA)
And separate Home Office figures revealed 6,000 crimes are going unsolved every day.
Some 2,136,252 crimes went unsolved across England and Wales in the year ending September 2024.
This accounted for nearly 40% of all crimes recorded that year.
Meanwhile, just 363,843 crimes resulted in a suspect being charged or summonsed – just 6.8% of cases.
In rape cases, this was 2.7%. These are both slight increases on the previous period (5.9% and 2.4% respectively) but still among the lowest levels recorded.
Liberal Democrat Spokesperson on Home Affairs Lisa Smart MP said: “Thousands of victims are being left without the justice they deserve every single day. The government promised to fix this – but these figures suggest the hard work has barely begun.”
And nearly half a million shoplifting offences were recorded by police, the highest 12-month total on record, figures show.
A total of 492,914 offences were logged by forces in the year to September 2024, up 23% from 402,220 in the previous 12 months.
The figure is the highest since current records began in the year to March 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Shoplifting levels had already reached a 20-year high last year, with the latest figures showing the crime continues to be on the rise.
Police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in the year to September, a 2% increase driven by shoplifting and a 22% rise in crimes involving theft from a person (146,109), according to the data published on Thursday.
Of the 473,342 police-recorded shoplifting offences in England and Wales in the year to September that have so far been assigned an outcome, 19% (88,165) resulted in a charge or summons, up from 16% in the previous 12 months, while 57% (269,237) of investigations were closed with no suspect identified, unchanged on the previous year, analysis of Home Office figures shows.
Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said the figures “remain unacceptably high” and the crimes were “blighting town centres and high streets right across the country”.
“For far too long these crimes have been written off as ‘low-level’ and not treated with the urgency or seriousness they deserve”, she said as she insisted the Government was “determined to turn the page” with its plan to boost police numbers and give officers the powers they need to “crack down on the criminals who cause misery in our communities”.
According to the ONS figures, knife crime recorded by police in England and Wales stood at 55,008 offences in the year to September 2024, up 4% from 52,969 in the previous 12 months and just below the pre-pandemic level of 55,170 in the year to March 2020.
The number of offences involving possession of an article with a blade or point fell slightly to 27,945, down 1% year-on-year from 28,181, but higher than the pre-pandemic figure of 23,264 in 2019/20.
Knife-enabled homicides stood at 228, down 14% from 264 in the previous 12 months.
Overall, police recorded 6.66 million crimes in England and Wales in the 12 months to September, a very slight drop (down 0.4%) on the previous year’s total of 6.69 million.