Crime is falling in Medway

Contrary to popular belief, fewer crimes are being committed in our towns, but Kent Police data paints a complicated picture overall

If you spend as much time as we do on local Facebook groups, you might start to think that crime is out of control in our towns, and that our streets are lawless warzones overrun with marauding criminals. Is that the reality though? We’ve been diving in to the data to figure it all out…

Some caveats before we begin: The majority of data included in this piece is collated from police.uk, who host national crime data broken down by local area. Data for this piece is compiled from data for every area of Medway using the most recent 12 months available, from August 2023 until July 2024.

The headline figure

It’s surprisingly difficult to come up with overall Medway figures on crime, but pulling together the local data from across our 22 wards¹ provides an overall figure of 32,188 recorded crimes during the 12 months to July 2024.

It is worth noting here that the recorded crime is very unlikely to be the same as the overall crime figure. A lot of crimes go unreported for a number of reasons, from criminal victims not reporting perpetrators to victims feeling reporting as being pointless to undetected crime. But for the sake of this piece, we’ll use the 32,188 figure.

When we last analysed the data for Medway like this, the 12 month crime figure was 35,566. That would suggest, from the data alone, that crime has fallen in Medway by 9.5% in the past year and a half.

Still, 32,188 still feels like a large number. With Medway’s most recent estimate of population giving a figure of 286,800, there is roughly one crime for every nine residents of Medway over the course of a year.

Comparison

It’s fair to say that there is quite a lot of crime in Medway. But is it particularly out of the ordinary?