THE number of violent crimes in Scotland rose last year, bucking the long-term trend.
The annual Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS) found there were an estimated 194,000 violent crimes in 2019/20, or 430 per 10,000 households.
This compared to 165,000 the previous year, or 370 per 10,000 households.
The proportion of all crimes which were violent also rose, from 29 per cent in 2018/19 to 34% in 2019/20, with the remainder deemed to be property crimes.
However the SCJS, which is based on surveys from more than 5,500 people, did not judge the increases to be “statistically significant”.
The Scottish Tories said the figures were “shocking” and criticised the Scottish Government for skating over them in its official response to the SCJS report.
Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf focused very much on the longer-term decline in violent crime, down 39% since 2008, rather than the year-on-year change.
The SCJS data, which covers the year before the coronavirus lockdown, includes offences not reported to the police.
Tory MSP Liam Kerr said: “These shocking new statistics reveal that violent crime is on the rise across Scotland and it hammers people in deprived areas twice as hard as everyone else.
“It’s galling that Humza Yousaf and the SNP hail these figures as some kind of success when they plainly show violent criminals are winning.
“Despite the best efforts of our officers, the SNP’s broken system means that a majority of crimes go undetected and the number of appalling incidents keeps rising higher.
“The SNP have diminished local police presence and the impact is clear – violence has spiked on their watch.”
The 232-page SCJS said its estimates had “relatively wide margins of error”.
It said violent crime fell from 317,000 offences in 2008/09, while the proportion of adults who were the victims of crime fell from 20.4% to 11.9% over the same period.
The vast majority of all violent crimes were minor assaults not resulting in injury (73%), while 10% were minor assaults where injury was inflicted, followed by attempted assault and serious assault, both on 6%, with 5% of all violent crimes being a robbery.
However, certain types of sexual crimes have risen in the past year.
From 2008/09 to 2019/20, there was an increase in the proportion of Scots reporting attempted forced sexual intercourse since the age of 16 (from 1.5% to 2%).
A similar rise was seen in the number of people, overwhelmingly women, who said they had been the victim of another form of attempted sexual activity, from 0.7% to 1.3%.
The number of people reporting unwanted sexual touching since they turned 16 also rose from 4.8% to 7.4% in the same time period.
The number of property crimes, such as theft and vandalism, has also almost halved since 2008/09, from 728,000 to 369,000 in the most recent year.
The proportion of adults reporting they had been the victim of a property crime also fell from 18% to 10%.
Most offences were for vandalism (38%), followed by household theft (27%), personal theft (22%), car theft (8%) and housebreaking (6%).
Mr Yousaf focused on the long-term decline.
He said: “This latest national survey underlines the findings from other official sources, such as recorded crime and hospital admissions data, that crime including violent crime, has fallen substantially over the last decade.
“This is down to the work of police, wider public services, the third sector and communities themselves – supported by Scotland’s firm focus on early intervention and prevention work, through the work of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit and Medics Against Violence and our No Knives Better Lives and Mentors in Violence Prevention programmes.
“While most people do not experience crime, the Scottish Government continues to strengthen how the justice system, wider public services and charities support those who do fall victim to crime. We have invested more than £75 million in support for victims over the past five years and we are increasing our resource funding by £1.5 million in next year’s justice budget to fund wide-ranging support to victims. At the same time the Victims Taskforce I established in 2018 continues to drive forward system improvements to ensure that victims remain at the heart of Scotland’s justice system.”
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