Scotland National Crime Overview
The Scottish Recorded Crime Data at Ward level up to the end of 2025 has recently been published. We have analysed the data and the findings at the national level are presented on this page together with a map showing rates of total crime in Wards across Scotland. There is now comparable data for six years from from 2020 to 2025 as in previous years’ the data was collected using a different set of categories and sub-groups.
The distribution of total crimes across Scotland is shown in Figure 1 (Scotland map below) where ward-level crimes corrected for population are displayed on a map.
National Trend
While total headline crime figures often dominate public commentary, aggregate totals can conceal vital shifts in societal well-being. An analysis of Police Scotland’s recorded crime data across all 32 local authorities between 2020 and 2025 reveals that Scotland’s aggregate non-motoring crime volume rose by a moderate 4.42% over six years (from 346,929 to 362,273 offences). The rise in total crimes is not itself statistically significant as a result of inter year noise and possibly the effect of Covid-19 during this period. Note that motoring offences which are highly influenced by local monitoring (e.g. speed cameras) have been excluded from the statistical analysis.
Crimes by Category
The picture changes substantially when the same six years of data are broken down into the eight standard recorded-crime categories — violence, sexual crimes, dishonesty, damage and reckless behaviour, crimes against society, antisocial offences, miscellaneous offences,steadily. See Table 1 below.
Non-sexual crimes of violence have risen steadily and close to linearly across all six years which is statistically significant, with no sign of a post-pandemic reversal. Non-sexual crimes of violence expanded by an average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of +2.57% per annum. This upward trend may reflect both increased offending and or changes in the way violent acts, threats, and domestic abuse offences are categorised by law enforcement. See Table 1 and Table 2 below.
Crimes of dishonesty which includes shoplifting and fraud — shows a strong upward trend that falls just short of surviving the stricter correction for multiple categories (Bonferroni), but is a strong enough candidate that it would likely be confirmed with another year or two of consistent data. The rise in Crimes of Dishonesty represents the single largest absolute volume increase in Scottish crime over the period (+15,936 annual offences in 2025 compared to 2020). Socio-economic pressures, inflationary living costs, and post-lockdown retail normalisation correlate strongly with increased retail theft, fraud, and opportunist acquisitive crime. See Table 1 and Table 2 below.
Damage and reckless behaviour which includes vandalism, property destruction exhibited a strong downward trend, dropping by over 5,600 recorded incidents per year nationally. This sustained and statistically significant drop suggests shifts in youth demographics, increased digital engagement, wider private CCTV/video doorbell installations, and physical target-hardening across commercial and residential developments. See Table 1 and Table 2 below.
City, Urban and Rural Patterns
Ward-level recorded crime data across all 32 Scottish local authorities, 2020–2025. Crime totals are broken down by eight crime categories and expressed both as raw counts and as rates per 1,000 population.
Note this is an informal grouping for the purposes of this piece, not an official classification. For this analysis, the 32 councils were grouped into three broad bands:
Cities:
Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen
Urban/Mixed (Central Belt):
Fife, North/South Lanarkshire, North/South/East Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, Falkirk, West Lothian, Inverclyde, Clackmannanshire, Stirling, Midlothian, East Lothian, East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, West Dunbartonshire
Rural/Island:
Highland, Argyll and Bute, Aberdeenshire, Angus, Moray, Perth and Kinross, Scottish Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Na h-Eileanan Siar, Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands
Across all six years, cities have consistently recorded higher crime rates than rural and mixed-urban areas:
Group Rate per 1,000 (2025)
Cities 118.2
Urban/Mixed 82.9
Rural/Island 73.1
Cities run roughly 60% higher than rural areas, and the gap is stable between years. The elevation in rates isn’t even across crime types: it’s driven overwhelmingly by Crimes of Dishonesty (theft, fraud, shoplifting), where cities post nearly three times the rural rate, along with antisocial offences and crimes against society (drugs, weapons). Violent and sexual crime rates are higher in cities too, but the gap is much narrower.
The headline takeaway is that it is theft, fraud, shoplifting and public-order crime that is driving the urban/rural divide, not violent crime, which is comparatively flat across Scotland. See Table 3 below
Glasgow and Edinburgh
Glasgow and Edinburgh together hold about 21% of Scotland’s population but account for 26–29% of total recorded crime each year, rising to 28.4% in 2025. Glasgow alone is consistently 16–17.5% of the national total; Edinburgh 10–11%. In practice, this means Scotland-wide crime headlines are disproportionately affected by the impact of these two cities although the effect is not excessively large.
Deprivation
East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire are consistently among the lowest-crime council areas in Scotland (35–52 per 1,000 across the whole period) and are also areas of comparatively low social deprivation. West Dunbartonshire, by contrast, is a high-deprivation area and posts a crime rate (122.2 per 1,000 in 2025) closer to city levels despite its smaller, less urban population. Dumfries and Galloway — an area of mixed deprivation — also posts a near-city rate (122.9), which breaks the idea that this is simply an urban/rural effect. This pattern is consistent with the well-established finding, seen across UK crime data more broadly, that recorded crime correlates with deprivation more consistently than with urban/rural status alone. Note that the data analysed here is showing an association between crime rates and deprivation status. Readers can cross-reference the SIMD deprivation maps for each of these local authorities on this site to see the impact of the underlying deprivation pattern on crime, health, employment, education and housing.
Social Cohesion in Island Communities
Orkney and Shetland post among the lowest crime rates in Scotland (36.6 and 51.5 per 1,000 in 2025 respectively) despite real pockets of hardship in places. A plausible explanation is stronger social cohesion: in small, close-knit island communities where families and neighbours know one another, and anonymity, a precondition for a lot of opportunistic and acquisitive crime , is harder to come by. This would fit with the pattern seen above, where it’s precisely the “anonymous” categories of crime (theft, dishonesty, antisocial behaviour) that show the steepest urban skew nationally.
City, Urban and Rural Summary
- Cities run a consistently higher crime rate than rural or mixed-urban Scotland, concentrated in dishonesty, antisocial and drugs/weapons offences rather than violent crime.
- Glasgow and Edinburgh combined generate a disproportionate share of Scotland’s recorded crime relative to their population share.
- Deprivation, not just urban/rural geography, appears to be a major factor — comparatively low-deprivation Central Belt areas (East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire) post the lowest rates in Scotland, while higher-deprivation areas outside the big cities (West Dunbartonshire) post rates close to city levels.
- Island communities are lower crime rate outliers, possibly reflecting stronger social cohesion and reduced anonymity for offenders.
Local Authority Analysis
The National Crime Data has also been analysed at a local authority level. The links to the pages for each local authority can found on the following page: Local Authority Links Page.
Selected Local Authority Links
Aberdeen City Crime Map
City of Edinburgh Crime Map
Dundee City Crime Map
Glasgow City Crime Map
Tables and Maps
Table 1: Scotland Crimes By Category 2020 to 2025
View the above table as an accessible HTML (screen reader friendly) version
Table 2: Scotland Crimes By Category Statistics Summary
View the above table as an accessible HTML (screen reader friendly) version
Table 3: scotland-crimes-by-council-2020-2025
View the above table as an accessible HTML (screen reader friendly) version
Figure 1: Total Non-Motoring Recorded Crime in Scotland (2020–2025)
A map showing the levels of total crime in Scottish Wards. The total crimes per 1000 ward population was grouped into 5 equal sized bands where Band 1 represents the group od Wards with the lowest rate of crimes per 1000 and Band 5 has the highest rate. See colour key in Crimes Bands legend.
Hover over and area to trigger a pop-up which displays provide additional local information.
Zoom in using the + – tool and drag the image to move around. Shetland Isles can be viewed by dragging the map down.
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Methods
Scottish Crime Data is available on the police website via https://www.scotland.police.uk/about-us/how-we-do-it/crime-data.
Shapefiles for UK Council Wards were obtained from the Ordnance Survey Data Hub (https://osdatahub.os.uk/ login required)
Ward population data was based on estimates for 2024 and no reliable source could be found for each year see https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/scotland/wards/.
Data Preparation
- Multiple annual crime data files (provided as fiscal years) were combined and calendar years were allocated to the data.
- Crime Rate Bands were allocated by splitting the ward crime rate per 1000 population into five equal sized bands based on ranks.
- Some remapping of wards was carried out since the police data in a few cases did not map precisely to ward codes. E.g. the police data combined Arran and Ardrossan (wards in North Ayrshire LA. Some ward areas are missing from the maps for the Hebridean Isles since the reported areas did not match to ward areas in the published map wards for the Hebridean Isles.
Statistical Models and Trend Testing
Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Linear Regression
To evaluate linear trends over the 6-year time horizon (n=6), an OLS linear regression model was fitted for national aggregate crime, individual crime groups, and selected local authorities.
Multiple Hypothesis Testing Adjustments
When evaluating m=7 distinct crime categories simultaneously, the risk of Type I errors (false positives) increases. To control for this, two adjustments were calculated:
Bonferroni Correction: The family-wise significance threshold was set to:
αbonf=mα=70.05=0.00714
Categories maintaining p<0.00714 (Damage & reckless behaviour and Non-sexual crimes of violence) maintain strict significance under family-wide error control.
Benjamini-Hochberg Procedure (FDR): To maintain statistical power while controlling false discoveries at Q=0.05, adjusted p-values (pBH) were computed by ranking raw p-values (p(i)):
p(i)≤miQ
Under this ranking, Crimes of Dishonesty (p=0.0151, rank 3) successfully passes the FDR critical value threshold (3/7×0.05=0.0214), confirming its validity as a true positive finding.