FOI reference: FOI-2025-3104
You asked
Have you performed any analysis comparing the incidence of various crime types, conviction rates and punishments for military personnel and civilians?
Are military personnel more likely to commit any particular type of crime? Are they more likely to commit that type of crime than a civilian?
Do military courts have lower percentage conviction rates than civilian courts? If so, why? Are there more false accusations? Is evidence harder to find? Is there evidence of corruption?
Are military personnel punished to the same degree as civilians? Punished harder? More softly?
Is there any evidence that a lack of visibility of justice results in worse behaviour from military personnel than from civilians? As in: "Justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done".
Please can you tell me what analysis you can provide on this subject? Links to any existing up to date (or nearly so) documents online would be great. If there is nothing like this already, I would be very grateful for advice on initiating any analysis possible.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Crime data published by the Office for National Statistics are produced from two sources of data; the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime. The CSEW is a victimisation survey that asks people within households about their experiences of crime, and police recorded crime covers the offences reported to and recorded by the police in England and Wales.
The CSEW does not collect information relating to perpetrators of crime, as its purpose is to report on crimes as experienced by victims. Therefore, we do not hold any data that would help with your specific queries.
The Home Office are responsible for the collation of police recorded crime data and may be able to assist you further with any police recorded crime-related queries. They can be contacted via CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk.
The Ministry of Justice are also responsible for collating data on offenders, prosecutions and convictions in England and Wales, so they may be able to assist further. They can be contacted at data.access@Justice.gov.uk.
For any military court queries, you will likely need to refer to the Ministry of Defence directly. The military court administration unit can be contacted via mcs-group@mod.gov.uk.
If you have any further crime-related queries, the ONS Centre for Crime and Justice can be contacted via CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk.