Police arrests:
the story behind
the headline

The Sun’s report that 40% of officers made no arrests invites an obvious question: what does that tell us about the work police are doing?

The wider picture is worth seeing. Across 41 forces in England and Wales, recorded arrests rose by nearly 12% between 2022/23 and 2024/25. Arrests increased in 36 of those forces, and grew faster overall than either staffing or the population. These are this article’s calculations from official arrest, workforce and population data.

That does not settle the question in the headline. A force can record more arrests while some of its officers make none. To understand those officers’ work, we would need to know their roles, the cases they handled and the decisions they made. The force totals used here cannot tell us that.

Start with the change over time

The clearest finding is that recorded arrest activity has been rising. The same 41 forces recorded about 654,000 arrests in 2022/23, 702,000 the following year and 732,000 in 2024/25. Keeping the forces the same helps us see the change without adding or removing areas halfway through. Annual figures and calculations.

A growing population might explain some increase in arrests. So might having more officers. Here, both grew by around 2%, while arrests grew by nearly 12%. The rise in recorded activity was therefore larger than either of those changes. That is useful information, even though it does not explain why the increase happened. Staffing and population calculations.

Recording changes are part of the picture. Staffordshire and Derbyshire have specific cautions in the Home Office notes. Leaving both out still gives an increase of about 11%. The wider rise does not depend on those two forces. Calculation data.

There are not yet five published years wholly after Covid in this series. The latest Home Office release ends in March 2025. The graphs start with 2022/23–2024/25. You can add the two earlier years, but they include the disruption of Covid and some changes in how arrests were counted.

Three ways to look at your force

A total tells us how many arrests a force recorded. It is useful for following that force over time. Comparing totals between forces is less straightforward: a force serving a much larger area may naturally record far more arrests.

The second graph puts arrests alongside the number of residents. It asks how much arrest activity there was for the size of the local population. The third puts arrests alongside officer staffing. It asks how much activity there was for the size of the police team.

Neither is an individual officer’s score. The staffing figure includes all officer roles, and allows for part-time working. It does not show who personally made each arrest or how many officers were available on a particular shift. The population figure counts residents, so it cannot capture everyone who visits or commutes into an area. Home Office workforce data; ONS force area populations.

Sussex provides a simple example of why the years matter too. Its arrests rose from 16,814 to 18,998, then fell to 18,570. There was a fall in the latest year, but the total was still above where it began. Looking at the whole line tells us more than choosing either the rise or the fall alone. Sussex annual data.

Choose your force and a few others below. Look first at the direction over time, then see how the picture changes when population and staffing are taken into account. Different views can suggest different questions; they do not produce a verdict on which force is best.

Download the five-year data (CSV). It includes all 43 assessed forces, the figures behind each rate and the reasons for exclusions.

What the headline leaves us wanting to know

Counting arrests is a reasonable starting point for asking about police activity. But the Sun’s headline is about individual officers, while the official series here counts arrests recorded by forces. One cannot reconstruct the other. This analysis does not reproduce the original officer-by-officer returns behind that percentage.

An arrest count also cannot tell us whether an arrest was needed. Under the general arrest-without-warrant power in section 24 of PACE, the officer needs the relevant grounds and must believe arrest is necessary. Less intrusive ways of meeting the objective must be considered. Those are decisions about the circumstances of a case. PACE Code G, paragraphs 1.3 and 2.1–2.9.

The useful question is what happened in the cases behind the numbers. Before setting arrest targets, leaders could use a force’s figures to select a sample of cases with identified suspects for review: why an arrest was or was not made, whether necessary action was missed, and what happened to the victim and the investigation afterwards. This is a proposed use of the figures; the graphs do not establish what such a review would find.

There is enough here to ask better questions. Recorded arrests rose across most of the forces examined. Understanding what that meant for the public requires looking beyond the count and into the work itself.