Firearms and violence

Yesterday the Home Office produced another publication updating the  Official Crime Statistics. These are based on the British Crime Survey and Police Recorded Crime. The publication can be found here. As usual this is a high quality document. I thought I would provide some alternative figures regarding violent crime because, as I have discussed before, a lot of violence does not fall within Home Office Crime Type 1 - violence against the person.

The table above shows all crime recorded by the Metropolitan Police Service, (which polices London) in 2009 that involved a firearm in the offence. On intial classification there were 5648 such offences. The tables show exactly what the offence is and which Home Office Crime Type they are categorised in. I think most people in the UK would think that offences involving firearms are the most violent of violent crimes. OK there may be a few technical offences in this lot that do not actually involve violence but the vast majority are really nasty crimes. Only about 40% are included in Home Office Type 1.