Negligible clandestine immigration that’s obsessed about is very noticeable because of how much it comes up when British normies talk.
Misperceptions are related to perceptions of “two-tier justice”.
I thought this was going to be about the rich vs everyone else but it’s that old trick the rich play of dividing us using racism
Most crime perpetuated (in value) is usually rich people and companies doing wage theft
We have some of the most popular newspapers in this country printing abject lies and half truths all year long
If you’re right wing in the UK and your media diet is typical for that, you’re basically living in a fictional reality. That’s why polling and conversing with the brainwashed is so baffling
Reform UK supporters stand out as most mistaken
No way! Really? The party of evil deceitful and lying fascists is full of malice and deception? I don’t believe it…
This makes for an excellent generalisation
The news cycle runs on keeping people convinced crime rates are high. The publics view of crime rates are intentionally skewed.
Yep. 24 hour news cycle is desperate for content to fill the void.
So anytime anything happens, they just hammer on it for days.
Which is also why they get so weirdly excited/gleeful when something tragic happens like a mass shooting or whatever, because they have days, even weeks of coverage without having to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
I would love news broadcasts that stop once they’ve covered key stories. 5mins one night, 20 the next? Fine! (But don’t ask me how we’d define key stories i only come with half a solution :) )
Imagine if you buy a newspaper and it only has 3 and a half pages? And 1 page is a nice story about a community hall being reopened? People would have a tangible feel on how safe things are. I think that’d be neat.
Like when Lemmy runs out of posts for a day, it’s kind of satisfying to get to the “end” for us completionists.
Maybe there is a connection between media representation of crime and that perception bias. And having murder mysteries running on all channels does not help, either.
The insane proliferation of procedural crime investigations shows like Law and Order and its derivatives like Criminal Minds has fucked up the perception of so much in society about crime and law enforcement. It’s almost a step beyond copadanga, not only is it presenting the police as the good guys standing between average people and the criminal underworld, but all crime is committed by seedy evil asocial villains. It’s full on cultic worship of the US “justice system”
THe law and orders always show the cops mistreating suspects, and always being justified in the end because even though they didnt have an ounce of evidence when they beat the shit out of him… they manage to asspull evidence at the end of the show to justify everything.
Thus normalizing police brutality, and creating the image in the public at large that if you got brutalized by the police then you deserved it, and if theres no evidence of you commiting a crime then you’re not innocent, just a sneaky bastard that got away with it.
Also the court case should be tied up in a nice bow and over with in a couple hours. They are totally not thing that can take weeks to go through.
No dude it’s even worse. They constantly get the wrong person at first. Abuse the shit out of them. Then find evidence of their innocence and just apologize and leave it at that.
We have this in the US too, with conservatives the most wrong about crime statistics vs reality.
Fox news is really good at plucking anecdotes and promoting them broadly.
I wanna see the study on people’s perception of white collar/crimes committed by politicians and the reality.
Yeah, this whole study was fucked because they ignored the greatest category of crime.
If you think about crime, and you think of pickpockets, burglary, and mugging, your head is in your ass.
The biggest crime today is overwhelmingly wage theft and other white collar crimes.
Yup, my favorite white collar crime is “social murder”.
AKA the UHC CEO.
Britons consistently overestimate how dangerous the county really is
Read the research
Wrongful convictions - misperceptions of crime (4.9MB pdf)
Most crime in England and Wales is falling – but the public think it’s rising. In fact, they are wrong about crime on nearly every measure: from how many people fall victim, to the ethnicity and nationality of offenders, and whether police numbers have increased or decreased, according to a major new study from the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
Based on two surveys of 1,797 and 2,164 UK adults, carried out with YouGov between 23 and 27 March 2026, Wrongful convictions? Misperceptions about crime among the UK public finds that while mistaken beliefs about crime are not confined to one political party, Reform UK supporters stand out as consistently most wrong – particularly on the ethnicity of those convicted of serious offences and the share of prisoners and offenders who are foreign nationals.
The study – part of a new research series called Mistaken Britain – also shows why these incorrect beliefs matter, with those who hold misperceptions about crime more likely to feel there is “two-tier justice” in the UK, more sceptical of the government’s ability to deal with crime, and more supportive of harsher, more punitive crime policies.
What the public get most wrong about crime
- The public overestimate how many people are victims of crime. Asked what share of the population in England and Wales personally experienced crime between 2024 and 2025, the public’s median guess is 27% – almost three times the reality of 9.7%.
- Crime is falling, but the public think it’s rising. Of five crime types tested, only shoplifting has actually risen since 2010 (up around 70%) – and the public gets that one right (84% say it increased). On every other measure, perception and reality point in opposite directions: 83% think mobile phone theft has risen when it has fallen by around 70%; majorities think domestic burglary (56%) and vehicle theft (62%) have risen when both have fallen by around 50%; and 37% think murder has risen when it is down around 20%.
- The public wrongly assume most people convicted of homicide are from an ethnic minority. In fact, 64% are white – but the public’s median guess is just 45%. Conversely, they overestimate the ethnic-minority share, putting it at 55% when the reality is 35%.
- Foreign nationals are assumed to be roughly double their true share of offenders. The public’s median guess is that foreign nationals make up 25% of the prison population (reality: 12%) and 30% of those cautioned for or convicted of sexual offences (reality: 15%) – around double the true proportion in both cases.
- The public wrongly think police numbers have been cut. Police officer numbers rose around 20% between 2018 and 2025, but two-thirds (63%) think they fell, and only 18% correctly say they rose at all.
- People think others are more fearful than they actually are. The public guess 60% of the population do not feel safe walking alone in their area after dark – significantly higher than the reality of 39%.
- Recency shapes the public’s perception of terrorism deaths. The 2000s and 2010s had the fewest terrorist deaths of any decade in the last 50 years – yet the public rank them second and third most deadly respectively. 27% correctly identify the 1970s as the deadliest – the top single option selected – but 55% wrongly pick a more recent decade.
Reform UK supporters stand out as most mistaken
Misperceptions about crime are not confined to one party, but there is a consistent gradient, with Reform supporters the clearest outliers.
- Reform UK supporters most underestimate the share of people convicted of homicide who are white (guess: 30%; reality: 64%), and most overestimate the share who are from ethnic minorities (guess: 70%; reality: 35%) – in both cases, wide of the mark by 10 points more than any other party.
- They most overestimate the share of those cautioned for or convicted of sexual offences who are foreign nationals, guessing it’s 50% – far above Conservatives (30%), who have the second-highest guess, and more than three times the reality of 15%.
- They have an inflated view of the risk of being a crime victim in England and Wales, guessing 34% were victims in a single year, against 25% among Conservatives and 20% among Labour, Lib Dem and Green supporters – all far above the 9.7% reality.
- Reform supporters guess 75% of the public do not feel safe walking alone in their area after dark –15 points higher than Conservatives (60%), who have the second-highest guess, and almost double the reality of 39%.
- On police numbers in England and Wales, majorities of all parties’ supporters wrongly think they fell, but 74% of Reform supporters have this misperception, compared with 66% of Conservative and 63% of Labour supporters.
How misperceptions link to attitudes and policy preferences
Misperceptions track how fearful people feel, how much they trust institutions, and what they want done about crime.
- Misperceptions are related to perceptions of “two-tier justice”. A majority (52%) of the public think ethnic or religious minorities are sentenced differently for crimes, with slightly more saying they are treated more leniently (29%) than harshly (23%). However, this belief is significantly higher among the factually mistaken: among those who wrongly think minorities make up 80%+ of homicide convictions, 44% say minorities get lighter sentences, compared with 29% of the public overall.
- Misperceptions connect to fear and distrust. Among those who say their quality of life is highly affected by fear of crime, 59% wrongly think murder has risen in England and Wales, versus 22% among those who say fear of crime has little impact on them. And while 35% of the public overall say they have no confidence at all in the government to deal with crime nationally, this rises to 46% among those who wrongly believe police numbers have fallen by a fifth or greater, and to 48% among those who incorrectly think murder has risen.
- There is a national vs local perception gap on crime. 65% expect crime to rise across the country as a whole over the next three years, yet only 40% expect it to rise in their own area.
- Mistaken beliefs are linked to more punitive policy demands. Support for harsher sentences for immigrants rises to a majority (54%) among those who wrongly think foreign nationals make up half or more of the prison population – above the 35% of the public overall who back such a policy.
Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, 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. There’s no single reason for this mistaken view of a key aspect of life in Britain: it’s an interaction between how we think and what we’re told.
“We have a deep negativity bias that tunes us to threat, and a rosy view of the past that makes us assume things were safer in the past than they were. When people respond with an inflated measure of crime, they aren’t just trying to estimate a reality – they’re sending a message about what worries them. And that’s compounded by what we’re told: ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ is a key news value for a reason, so the picture we’re fed points relentlessly to the frightening and the violent.
“But these misperceptions also vary significantly across the public – they are far larger among Reform UK supporters, and they hit hardest where crime connects to other concerns like immigration and diversity. For example, Reform supporters think ethnic minorities make up 70% of those convicted of homicide, which is double the reality.
“The hard truth is there are no easy fixes – this is rooted in our psychology and in real media, social media and political incentives to play to our concerns. Simplistic myth-busting won’t do it on its own, because it misdiagnoses a large part of the cause: these beliefs are as much about identity and emotion as information. But that’s not a reason to give up on the facts – it really matters for individual quality of life and the quality of debate in a country that these misperceptions are recognised, and we do a better job of communicating the reality.”
++Study details ++
All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1,797 adults for all questions, except for the question on the share of the public who personally experienced a crime between 2024 and 2025, where the sample comprised 2,164 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 23 and 27 March 2026. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all UK adults (aged 18+) by age, gender and education (interlocked), vote in the 2024 general election and region (interlocked), vote in the 2016 EU referendum, socio-economic classification, political attention, and ethnicity.The question on the ethnicity of those convicted of homicide was asked as a split sample experiment, to test whether telling respondents what share of the overall population each ethnic group represents improves the accuracy of their guesses. Median guesses on this question are derived by combining results across both halves of the sample.
++Sources for “realities” ++
Most crime reality figures in the report are for England and Wales rather than the whole UK, reflecting that crime, policing and justice are devolved, and the official data is reported on that basis – though the figures are broadly consistent whether measured for England and Wales or the UK as a whole. The exception is terrorism, where the underlying data covers the whole UK. See full report for sources.In this story
Professor Bobby Duffy
Director
Jesus, even this study makes the same mistakes.
They didn’t even study the largest crimes: wage theft. They literally ignored the biggest group of crime. That fucks up the whole study.
It’s important to keep pushing any and all fear based narratives.
I wonder if that could be connected with the fear-mongering and 24 hour news cycle?
the people who are the most paranoid about crime live in the places where it is least likely to occur and have never been the victim of crime.
it’s sort of like the issue with immune systems, if you grow up ultra clean… you develop allergies because your immune system overreactions because it wasn’t trained how to react appropriately.
I remember some research on heavy TV viewership from 80 or 90 proving it dramatically increases perceived crime rates. Can’t imagine social media not making it worse…
Olde trick: The more the copaganda and disinfo… The more the police state and fascism…
Bonus points for blaming marginalized groups.
