You asked
I would like to know the percentage of all crimes in 2017 (financial year) that were drug offences.
We said
Thank you for your request for information relating to the percentage of all crimes which were drug offences for the financial year ending March 2017.
We draw on two main sources to measure crime levels and trends: the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime. The CSEW is a household survey that asks people resident in households about their experiences of victimisation of crime. Police recorded crime are crimes that are recorded by the police.
As the CSEW is a victim survey, it excludes so called “victimless” crimes such as drug possession, therefore for your request police recorded crime data is the better measure.
Drug offences recorded by the police include offences involving trafficking of drugs and possession of drugs. In the year ending March 2017, there were 136,342 drug offences recorded by the police in England and Wales. There were 4,965,270 offences recorded by the police in the same period. Drug offences accounted for 2.7% of all crime recorded by the police in the year ending March 2017.
The data can be found in Appendix Table A4, published alongside our ‘Crime in England and Wales, year ending March 2017’ annual bulletin. These data are also available broken down by individual offence classifications.
If you would like any further information in the future, you can simply email us at CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask.