Crime in the Gwent Police area

By type of offence

Recorded offences in the 12 months to June 2026, with the change on the 12 months before.

Set against the national mix of offences, public order stands out in the Gwent Police area: it makes up about 49% more of recorded crime here than it does nationally, with criminal damage and arson also over-represented. In the other direction, theft from the person, and drugs all make up well under their national share.

Home Office recorded crime, data.police.uk. Rates use ONS mid-year population estimates (unknown residents). Categories are the Home Office crime types as published; they are not comparable with court or conviction figures.

What happened to those crimes

Police recorded 58,334 offences other than anti-social behaviour in Gwent Police in the year to June 2026. By the time this data was published, about 27% had been closed with no suspect identified and 40% closed because a prosecution was not possible or not pursued. Around 11% had led to a charge, caution or other formal action, and 22% were still open.

Outcomes describe where each investigation stood when the data was published, so recent offences are naturally still open and the closed shares will edge up as cases conclude. Anti-social behaviour is left out entirely: police record no outcomes for it, and counting it would quietly flatter every percentage here. "Formal action" spans charges, summonses, cautions, penalty notices and community resolutions.

Over time

Recorded crime in the Gwent Police area peaked at 73,800 offences in 2011; the latest 12 months, at 71,018, are about 4% below that peak. That works out at roughly 195 a day.

Download every month as CSV, including which months each force filed.

Time of year

Recorded crime here peaks in July, about 27% above its quietest month, December.

Crime in context

Officers to record it

Gwent Police had 1,552 full-time equivalent officers as at 31 March 2026, 2.58 per 1,000 residents, above the England and Wales figure of 2.42. That is 38% above its low point of 1,127 in 2016. Recorded crime partly measures how much policing there is to record it, so a change in officer numbers moves the figures on this page even when nothing else does.

Officer numbers are full-time equivalents from the Home Office police workforce return. Nothing in this section causes anything on this page: a correlation is not a cause.

Who oversees policing in the Gwent Police area

Policing in the Gwent Police area is overseen by the police and crime commissioner for Gwent Police. Jane Mudd (Labour Co-op) won that election in May 2024. Since that election, recorded crime here is up 4.5% (the latest 12 months of data against the 12 months up to the election).

The police force covering an area is answerable to a directly elected commissioner, or to the combined authority mayor where that office has taken the role on. The coloured strip under the trend chart shows these terms against the crime line.

The change column reports what recorded crime did across each term, because it is the first thing a reader wants from this table. It is what happened, not what the officeholder caused: recorded crime moves with reporting rules, how a force records what is reported, national policy and a pandemic, and those effects are far larger than anything one commissioner does in four years. The terms spanning 2020 and 2021 in particular contain the lockdowns, which cut recorded crime everywhere and handed the following term the rebound.

These are election results, not terms of office: commissioners resign, die and are disqualified mid-term, and by-elections between the scheduled polls are listed here only where one has been held. For who holds the office today, the force's own website is the authority. The last column compares recorded crime in the 12 months ending at the handover (or the latest data) with the 12 months ending at the election itself; where a monthly return is missing, the window slides by up to four months to the nearest complete one. A dash means the term ran under a year or no complete window exists near it.

Questions

Is crime in the Gwent Police area going up or down?

In the Gwent Police area, the latest 12 months are almost level with the 12 before. Over the full series, recorded crime here peaked at 73,800 offences in 2011 and the current total is about 4% below it.

What is the most common crime in the Gwent Police area?

The most commonly recorded offence in the Gwent Police area is violence and sexual offences, with 25,686 offences in the 12 months to June 2026 (36% of all recorded crime). The next most common is anti-social behaviour, with 12,684.

Where does this come from?

Police recorded crime open data, published at data.police.uk by the Home Office under the Open Government Licence. It covers offences the police recorded, which is not the same as offences committed: crimes that are never reported never appear. Rates use ONS mid-year population estimates. How the figures work sets out the calculation, the reporting lag and every known gap.