Homicidal crime in the UK over the years

Homicidal crime over the last decade has seen changes, yet continues to exist in today’s day and age. Deaths in the United Kingdom have involved crimes like murder, manslaughter and infanticide – each one being an act of homicidal crime.

A recent article by The Guardian in 2019 stated statistics regarding homicidal crime in the UK to be growing in recent years, supported by data collected by The Office for National Statistics. The data highlighted 2018 as the year with the highest number of deaths faced due to homicidal crime.

But what exactly do the numbers from previous years show? How has homicidal crime and lives lost due to the aforementioned series of offences changed through the years in England and Wales?

Here’s a recap of homicidal crimes in the last decade:

Homicidal death by the use of a firearm

We can see a clear representation of a decrease in the use of firearms over the last 9 years with the highest rate of use being in 2010/2011. Numbers are not exceptionally high in this case highlighting the total number of deaths caused by the use of a firearm to be low.

Homicidal death without the use of a firearm

Now, looking at homicidal crimes over the last years, we can see a steady rate of crimes that were committed at the beginning of the decade, followed by a rise in 2016 and no sign of decline yet. Even though the use of firearms are non-existent in these cases, crime rates are shown to be continually rising with time.

Total number of homicidal deaths in England and Wales

Putting the numbers together showcases all the crimes committed in England and Wales that were classified as homicide by The Office for National Statistics. Even though firearm’s play a small percentage of crimes committed in relation to homicides over the last 10 years, a clear increase highlights how crime in the UK is rising.

Here’s the code I used:

library(tidyverse)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages("dplyr")
library(CRAN)
install.packages("corrplot")
library(corrplot)
install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
devtools::install_github('bbc/bbplot')
if(!require(pacman))install.packages("pacman")

pacman::p_load('dplyr', 'tidyr', 'gapminder',
               'ggplot2',  'ggalt',
               'forcats', 'R.utils', 'png', 
               'grid', 'ggpubr', 'scales',
               'bbplot')

homicide_data <- read_csv("Book3.csv")
homicide_data1 <- read.csv("homicide1.csv")
homicide_data2 <- read.csv("homicide1.0.csv")

homicide_data3 <- homicide_data2 %>%
  na.omit()

homicide_data4 <- read.csv("homicide2.0.csv")

homicide_data5 <- homicide_data4 %>%
  na.omit()

ggplot(homicide_data5, aes(x=Year, y=Firearm))+
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill= "firebrick", width = 0.5)+
  labs(title = "Homicidal deaths by the use of a firearm", 
       subtitle = "Source: ONS") +
  geom_text(aes(label = Firearm), vjust= 2.5, color= "black", size = 5)+
  theme_minimal()

ggplot(homicide_data5, aes(x=Year, y=No.firearm))+
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill= "firebrick", width = 0.5)+
  labs(title = "Homicidal deaths not including the use of a firearm", 
       subtitle = "Source: ONS") +
  geom_text(aes(label = No.firearm), vjust= 1.6, color= "black", size = 5)+
  theme_minimal()

ggplot(homicide_data5, aes(x=Year, y=Total.homicides))+
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill= "firebrick", width = 0.5)+
  labs(title = "Total number of homicidal deaths in the UK", 
       subtitle = "Source: ONS") +
  geom_text(aes(label = Total.homicides), vjust= 1.6, color= "black", size = 5)+
  theme_minimal()