Ethnicity and the criminal justice system

Stages not shown

These stages are registered but have no calculated figures yet, because a required official table is not ingested or the periods do not overlap the census.

• Arrests per 100,000 residents by self-defined ethnicity
• Stop and searches per 1,000 residents by self-defined ethnicity
• Sentenced prisoners per 100,000 residents by ethnicity
• Police use of force reports per 1,000 residents by self-defined or officer-perceived ethnicity

Why the population figures come from the census

A rate needs a population to divide by, and ethnicity is only counted for the whole population at the census. That means the denominator is fixed at census day and does not move with the years above it. Where a group has grown or shrunk since, its rate will drift accordingly. This is a real limitation of the arithmetic, not a detail: it is why the rates are shown beside their counts rather than on their own.

Records with no ethnicity

A large share of records in some series have no ethnicity recorded at all. Those records cannot be given a rate, because there is no population to divide them by. They are not redistributed across the other groups and they are not quietly dropped: where a source publishes them they appear as their own row with a count and no rate. Any comparison between groups is therefore a comparison of the records where ethnicity was recorded.

Check this

Every figure above resolves to a government table. See the calculations, or challenge one of them if you think a denominator, a category match or a period is wrong.