Crime over time in Dorset
Recorded crime in Dorset fell 20% between the year to July 2017 and the year to July 2026, from 25,934 to 20,740.
Month by month
Year by year
Calendar years inside the period. A change is given only between two complete years, because a year missing months is not comparable with one that has them all.
| Year | Recorded | Change on the year before | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 10,333 | August to December only | |
| 2017 | 27,143 | ||
| 2018 | 27,662 | +1.9% | |
| 2019 | 25,628 | −7.4% | |
| 2020 | 26,795 | +4.6% | |
| 2021 | 24,982 | −6.8% | |
| 2022 | 23,572 | −5.6% | |
| 2023 | 23,145 | −1.8% | |
| 2024 | 22,444 | −3.0% | |
| 2025 | 21,101 | −6.0% | |
| 2026 | 12,438 | January to July only |
What a change in recorded crime does and does not mean
Everything here is crime the police recorded, which is not the same thing as crime that happened. Three things move recorded crime that have nothing to do with how much of it there is.
- How carefully the police record. A 2014 inspection found forces failing to record around one crime in five reported to them. Recording was tightened in response, and recorded violence and public order offences climbed for years afterwards without the Crime Survey for England and Wales finding a rise to match.
- How much the police go looking. Drug offences and possession of weapons are mostly found by officers searching people, so they follow the amount of searching as closely as the amount of offending.
- How many people there are. These are counts, not rates. The population of England and Wales grew by about 6% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, so a count that holds steady over that time is a rate that is slowly falling.
For long-run trends in the offences it covers, the Office for National Statistics treats the Crime Survey for England and Wales as the better guide. Recorded crime comes into its own for what the survey cannot do: rare offences, single months and individual places. How the figures on this site work.
All recorded crime is the same figure every other page on this site uses: every street-level record the police publish, which includes anti-social behaviour.