Home Office · Police powers and procedures: arrests
Arrests for notifiable offences by self-defined ethnicity
754,046arrests
Arrests for notifiable offences by self-defined ethnicity were 754,046 arrests in the year ending March 2025, up 4.6% (32,943) from 721,103 in the year ending March 2024.
▲ 4.6% · +32,943 against Year ending March 2024 (year on year)
- Home Office count
- Year ending March 2025
- published 19 August 2026
- A.01c
- row “2024/25”
- column “Total”
- cell value 754046
Year ending March 2007 to Year ending March 2025
What this measures
Persons arrested for notifiable offences in England and Wales in the year ending March, split by the ethnicity the arrested person gave (Asian, Black, Mixed, White, Other) with "Not stated" as its own category.
What this doesn’t measure
Officer-observed ethnicity (published separately in table A.01d), rates per head of population, or the offending of any group; an arrest is not a charge or a conviction.
Important caveat
Ethnicity is self-defined by the person arrested and recorded by the officer. Where it was not given it is published as "Not stated"; that row is kept here as its own category and is never removed or redistributed. The Not stated share has grown since 2018/19 and reached 61 per cent of Metropolitan Police records in 2024/25 after the force changed its data system in November 2022, so the England and Wales figures for every named group understate arrests of people in that group by an unknown amount. From 2019/20 people who identify as Chinese are counted in the Asian (or Asian British) group; before that they were in Other. Arrests are a measure of police activity, never of the offending of any group.
When the way this was measured changed
A series can move because the thing being measured changed, or because the way of measuring it changed. Each change below is marked on the chart, and says what the figures meant on either side of it.
April 2019 · definition change
- Before
- People who identify as Chinese counted in the Other group.
- After
- People who identify as Chinese counted in the Asian (or Asian British) group.
From 2019/20 people who identify as Chinese are counted in the Asian (or Asian British) group; before that they were counted in Other (Home Office note 3).
Revision history
No period of this series has been revised since it was first ingested here. Revisions are recorded automatically when a later release publishes a different figure for the same period.
Source
- Publisher
- Home Office
- Publication
- Police powers and procedures: arrests
- Release
- 2026-08-19, published 19 August 2026
- Source file
- arrests-data-tables-summary-mar25.ods
- File SHA-256
- 142aea7e95bcc50b16b0bd03e403ac45e782ce2284b49484f03fb222f4fa3357
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Sheet
- A_01c
- Table
- A.01c
- Row
- 2024/25
- Column
- Total
- Cell value
- 754046
- Geography
- England and Wales
- Unit
- arrests
- API
- /api/metrics/arrests_by_ethnicity · /series · /vintages
Government periods
Change during each government, from the level inherited to the last complete period before it left office. Describes the period; does not attribute cause.
| Conservative 2019–2024 | 685,176Year ending March 2019 | 721,103Year ending March 2024 | ↑ 5.2% |
| Conservative 2017–2019 | 762,419Year ending March 2017 | 685,176Year ending March 2019 | ↓ 10.1% |
| Conservative 2015–2017 | 941,692Year ending March 2015 | 762,419Year ending March 2017 | ↓ 19.0% |
| Coalition 2010–2015 | 1,385,322Year ending March 2010 | 941,692Year ending March 2015 | ↓ 32.0% |
- Release
- 2026-08-19 · publication page
- Last updated
- 19 August 2026
- Next release expected
- November 2026 (estimated from the usual cadence)