British Police Accused of Political Correctness as Failure to Record Ethnicity of Criminals Soars

British police forces have been accused of being afraid of getting called racist as the recording of criminal ethnicity fell to the lowest rate in at least 15 years.

According to Ministry of Justice data unearthed in Freedom of Information requests by former Tory minister Neil O’Brien, the percentage of instances in which British police failed to log the ethnicity of child sex offenders stood at 28.7 per cent last year, up from 11.6 per cent in 2010. For sex crimes as a whole, police failed to record the ethnicity of 29 per cent of perpetrators, up from 15 per cent, The Telegraph reported.

Similarly, police failed to record the ethnicity of those convicted of murder, rape, and assault resulting in grievous bodily harm in over one in three instances (34.4 per cent) last year, compared to 11.8 per cent in 2010.

The trend of listing the ethnicity of criminals as “unknown” was also seen in lower-level crimes, including 44 per cent of robberies last year, up from 14 per cent, and 30.2 per cent for shoplifting, compared to seven per cent in 2010. The MoJ figures showed the most significant increase in drug offences, from an eight per cent failure to record ethnic data in 2010 to 39 per cent in 2024.

The failures come despite years of warnings that police forces throughout England had overlooked the scourge of child rape grooming gangs, in which mostly Muslim Pakistani-heritage men sexually preyed upon and trafficked young white girls for fear of appearing racist or stoking ethnic divides.

Last week, a national police task force revealed that Pakistanis are up to four times more likely to commit child sexual grooming crimes than the general population. However, even the task force admitted that their figures were “limited” as police forces in England and Wales had only recorded the ethnicities of around a third of suspects.

Commenting on the revelations, former Conservative government minister Neil O’Brien surmised that political correctness was to blame for the increasing instances of police not recording the ethnicities of offenders.

“It has to be wariness on the part of the authorities about recording and fear of being called racist,” the Harborough, Oadby and Wigston MP said.

“We don’t see a big rise in refusal to declare in other services, and the rise across the country is completely inconsistent.”

Robert Jenrick, the Conservatives’ shadow justice secretary, demanded that the government provide Parliament with an annual report documenting every convicted offender’s ethnicity, nationality, visa, and asylum status.

“The reduction in published data on the ethnicity of convicted criminals, in sharp contrast to data on age or sex, will only fuel perceptions that the British state is covering up the costs of migration,” Jenrick said.

“We urgently need all the data so that, for the first time, we can see the actual impact of different types of migration.”

While establishment governments of both Labour and the Tories have refused to publish data relating to the criminality of migrant groups in Britain, an analysis conducted last year by The Telegraph found that foreigners were over a quarter more likely to be imprisoned than the native population.

The report also found wide disparities among different foreign nationalities, with Albanians being by far the most likely to be imprisoned, at a rate of one in 50, followed by migrants from Kosovo, Vietnam, Algeria, Jamaica, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia. On the other hand, Germans were the least likely, followed by Italians, Greeks, Americans, Sri Lankans, French, and Chinese.

The findings led to calls for the government to curtail migration from countries which produced higher numbers of migrant criminals.

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