Council report shows crime increase
A recent report to Brighton & Hove City Council’s Equalities, Community Safety and Human Rights Committee reported 28,757 recorded crimes in Brighton and Hove in 2022-23. Over 1,000 crimes more than the 27,531 in 2021-22.
The report breaks down recorded crime in 2022-23.
Violence against the person 9,541 (33 per cent of the total)
Theft (excluding vehicles) 7,016 (25 per cent)
Public order 3,381 (12 per cent)
Criminal damage and arson 2,621 (9 per cent)
Vehicle offences 1,596 (6per cent)
Sexual offences 1,261 (4 per cent)
Burglary 1,047 (4 per cent)
Drug offences 923 (3 per cent)
Possession of weapons 370 (1 per cent)
Robbery 299 (1 per cent)
Crime patterns were concentrated in the centre of Brighton, with the summer months being a peak time for criminal activity associated with a peak in visitor numbers.
Unsurprisingly, violence occurs more frequently on Friday and Saturday nights linked to alcohol sales and consumption being higher than England and the south-east averages and higher than the average of the city’s matched local authorities.
Also, latest estimates based on modelling from 2019-20 show that, compared with the south-east and England, the proportion of the city’s resident population using opiates or crack cocaine remains significantly higher. Habitual drug users are drivers of “acquisitive crimes” – and police are increasingly dealing with “cuckooing” when drug dealers take over the homes of vulnerable adults. Dealers are believed to have taken over 11 properties in this way in 2023-24 up to the end of December.
Children and young people and vulnerable adults are often recruited to act as drug runners from the house or flat. Cuckooing victims and young or vulnerable drug runners are counted among the 24 cases of modern slavery recorded in 2022-23.
Over the past year, there has been an increase in groups of children and young people who have become associated with urban street gangs and engaged in serious crimes and disorder, often involving the threat or use of knives and other weapons. A 16-year-old boy is currently awaiting sentence for a drug-related murder after he stabbed 17-year-old Mustafa Momand in Queen’s Road, Brighton, last October.
The report said that, for the first nine months of 2023-24, the number of police-recorded crimes had risen by 3.6 per cent when compared with the same period for the previous year, rising from 21,720 to 22,511.
But the number of public order offences fell by 7.3 per cent in the first nine months of this year to 2,465 from 2,659 in the first nine months of 2022-23.