How many arrests for CSAM did the National Crime Agency record in 2024?
Executive summary
The available reporting provided does not contain a definitive figure for how many arrests for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) the National Crime Agency (NCA) recorded in 2024; none of the supplied NCA documents or related sources state an NCA-wide CSAM arrest total for that year [1] [2]. Assertions elsewhere about arrests for CSAM relate to other agencies (U.S. federal, state, and international partners) or to specific operations and do not substitute for an NCA aggregate figure [3] [4] [5].
1. What the supplied NCA material actually shows — no CSAM total
The NCA materials in the packet include a press release about nine arrests tied to an international people‑smuggling operation (INTERPOL Operation Liberterra II) and the NCA’s 2023–24 annual report that highlights 438 arrests in a UK fraud operation (Operation Henhouse), but neither document reports an NCA-wide tally of arrests specifically for CSAM in 2024, so the direct question cannot be answered from these documents alone [1] [2].
2. Reporting elsewhere documents CSAM arrests — but not by the NCA
The other supplied sources detail arrests for CSAM made by a range of agencies: U.S. federal and state law enforcement (Secret Service, HSI/ICE, state ICAC and CHP), international takedowns and financial‑tracing investigations, and task‑force arrests — each describing individual cases or multilateral operations, but none of these items provide an NCA total for CSAM arrests in 2024 [3] [4] [6] [5].
3. Why the absence matters: different mandates and reporting practices
The NCA’s public outputs in this collection emphasize organised‑crime priorities and case studies (people‑smuggling, economic crime) rather than a consolidated public metric for CSAM arrests; separate agencies and specialist teams (Internet Crimes Against Children task forces, HSI, national police forces, Europol partners) routinely publish their own CSAM case counts and press releases, which fragments attribution of arrests across jurisdictions and makes an aggregated NCA-only number unlikely to appear in unrelated NCA publications [2] [1] [5].
4. Plausible reasons an NCA CSAM total might be absent from supplied sources
If the NCA did participate in CSAM investigations in 2024, those actions may be reported in partnership statements, not in a single NCA annual headline, or may be embedded in operational summaries that were not included in the provided documents; the supplied NCA items instead focus on operations where the NCA led UK responses to organised crime and international crime rather than child exploitation specifics [2] [1]. The reporting package contains multiple CSAM arrests by other agencies, underscoring that CSAM enforcement is distributed across many bodies, which complicates attribution to the NCA alone [3] [4] [6] [5].
5. The journalistic conclusion: honest answer based on available reporting
Based strictly on the documents provided, there is no recorded figure stating how many arrests for CSAM the National Crime Agency recorded in 2024; therefore the correct answer is that the number is not available in the supplied reporting [1] [2]. To produce a precise NCA figure would require either an NCA statement or dataset specifically enumerating CSAM arrests in 2024, or an authoritative secondary compilation that attributes arrests to the NCA — neither of which appears among the supplied sources [2] [1].
6. Next steps and where to look for a definitive number
A definitive number would most likely be found in a dedicated NCA child‑exploitation report, an NCA Freedom of Information/official statistics release, or in consolidated UK law‑enforcement statistics that break down offences by type and agency; absent those, researchers should cross‑reference NCA operational releases with UK police and specialist unit publications (ICAC equivalents, National Crime Agency operational summaries, and Home Office statistics) to build an attributable total [2] [1].