Staff Writer Guy de Basto and News Editor Daniella Ronceros examine the surprising prejudices we have as a society and the root of their causes.
The inaugural release in the King’s “Mistaken Britain” series concludes that the public’s crime beliefs are largely misguided.
A recent study at King’s College London has found that the British public is remarkably misinformed about crime rates in the UK.
New research from the Policy Institute at King’s have found that the British public is mistaken about crime on almost every measure tested, believing it to be rising when virtually every type is actually falling.
The findings come from the first segment of a news research series called Mistaken Britain, from the Policy Institute at King’s, created to help close the gap between public belief and the data in reality across important political issues.
As for the methodology of the study, the findings are drawn from two separate YouGov surveys of UK adults aged 18 and over, each conducted with about 2,000 participants, who were surveyed online between 23 and 27 March of this year.
The team then weighted the data so that it reflected the UK adult population across a number of key factors, including but not limited to: age, 2024 general election vote, region, 2016 EU referendum vote, political attention and ethnicity.
Using the results from the survey, the public’s median guess for the share of people who were victims of crime in England and Wales between 2024 and 2025 was a staggering 27%, approximately three times the actual figure of 9.7%.
Intriguingly, the general public also tended to get the trajectory of crime badly wrong.
A key takeaway from the survey done was that perceptions of the perpetrator of the crime are similarly skewed. The data suggests that the public drastically underestimates the proportion of homicide convictions involving white offenders, with the median guess being 45% against a reality of 64%. This was also similar on the flip side, with participants overestimating the ethnic-minority share at 55%, while the real number is actually much closer to 35%.
Of five crime types tracked in the study, only one measure, shoplifting, had risen since 2010, which is up by around 70%. It’s also the only type that the people surveyed correctly identified as having risen. Incredibly, every other category of crime measured in the survey has declined sharply, in stark contrast to what many respondents believed.
The survey found that 83% of people believed mobile phone theft has gone up since 2010, when it has actually fallen by approximately 70%. The researchers also identified that the murder rate is misjudged, with 37% believing it has increased, despite a fall of roughly 20%.
Moreover, sizable majorities notably think that domestic burglary (56%) and vehicle theft (62%) have both risen dramatically, when, in fact, both have fallen by roughly half over the same sample size.
On a further note, foreign nationals are assumed to make up roughly double their true share of offenders too. The public estimates that 25% of the prison population is foreign nationals, instead of the 12%. Additionally, they believe that 30% of sexual-offence convictions are by foreign nationals, instead of the 15% that are.
However, one of the most interesting findings in the study is that public perception of policing is among the most striking reversals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the number of police officers in England and Wales rose by around 20% between 2018 and 2025. However, when asked, 63% of the public think the number of police fell, and only 18% of participants correctly identified an increase. Moreover, only 4% of respondents could identify the 20% increase in police over the seven years.
It is worth noting that most of the crime figures used as benchmarks relate specifically to both England and Wales, as slight complications arise when acknowledging that policing and criminal justice are devolved matters. More specifically, they stem from Scotland and NI having completely separate legal systems and crime surveys from those in England and Wales (and their police forces), with each having different recording standards and offence definitions. In practice, this is statistically insignificant, with the figures remaining broadly consistent across the UK.
Explaining the findings, Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s said, “The public are very wrong about crime – they think the risk is higher than it is, that everything is getting worse when many aspects are improving, and that police numbers have fallen when they’ve actually risen.”
He also pointed to the psychological root cause, remarking that “a deep negativity bias” naturally tunes people to threat, which is only further compounded by extensive media coverage that “points relentlessly to the frightening and the violent.”
About the authors
