Uk arrests per year
Executive summary
Official statistics for England and Wales show roughly 720,506 arrests in 2023/24, a rise in most forces compared with the prior year and a picture marked by clear gender, regional and ethnic disparities; national datasets and police annual returns underpin these figures but they cover England and Wales rather than the whole UK [1] [2] [3].
1. Arrests in raw numbers: the recent headline
The most recent consolidated reporting indicates there were about 720,506 arrests in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024, with violence against the person the largest single category (309,071 arrests) according to aggregated government-derived tabulations reproduced in statistical summaries [1]. Independent commercial aggregations of Home Office/Gov.uk releases provide a gender breakdown showing approximately 603,438 men and 113,762 women were arrested in 2023/24, both up on the prior year [4]. These headline counts come from the police annual data requirement and the Home Office-led publications that form the basis of crime and policing statistics [3] [5].
2. Patterns beneath the total: who, where and how often
Arrest rates and force-level volumes reveal stark geographic variation: Cleveland recorded the highest arrest rate in 2023/24 at 19.8 arrests per 1,000 people while Dorset recorded one of the lowest at 6.7 per 1,000, illustrating how policing priorities, local crime patterns and recording practice affect arrest numbers [6]. London’s Metropolitan Police accounted for by far the largest number of arrests among forces, arresting 96,426 people in 2023/24, with Greater Manchester the next largest at 47,611—figures that reflect population size, policing resources and urban policing demands [7]. Of the 43 territorial forces reporting, 31 carried out more arrests in the year ending March 2024 than in the year ending March 2023, while 11 carried out fewer, signalling a broadly rising arrest workload across England and Wales [2].
3. Disparities, stop-and-search links and online policing
Ethnic disproportionality is a persistent feature of the arrests data: Black people were over twice as likely to be arrested as white people in the latest ethnicity facts and figures release—20.4 arrests per 1,000 Black people versus 9.4 per 1,000 white people—highlighting systemic disparities captured at the arrest stage [8]. The yield from stop-and-search also matters: 14.3 percent of stop-and-searches resulted in an arrest in 2023/24, up from 13.6 percent the previous year, linking stop-and-search practice directly to arrest volumes [9]. Separately, reporting drawn from custody booking data and national press coverage has suggested thousands of arrests annually for online speech-related offences—one synthesis reported an average of about 12,000 arrests per year between 2021 and 2023 for social media posts or private messages—though this figure derives from media-obtained custody data and wider reporting rather than a single, definitive national table [10].
4. Sources, scope and limits of the evidence
The arrest totals and breakdowns rest on police returns compiled under the annual data requirement and presented through Home Office/Gov.uk statistical releases and open police data portals; these are the official bases for counting arrests but are explicitly for England and Wales [3] [11] [2]. Commentary and third-party aggregators such as Statista reproduce and visualise this material but sometimes behind paywalls, and some claims reported in the press (for example on online-speech arrests) use custody data obtained by journalists rather than a single official dataset—readers should treat such figures as indicative and seek the original data source [4] [10]. The present reporting does not provide an all-UK total that includes Scotland and Northern Ireland within the same dataset; those jurisdictions publish separate statistics and would need to be combined for a true UK-wide arrest count, a task beyond these sources [2] [5].