Professor John Robertson OBA

From Homicide in Scotland, 2024-25 published yesterday:

Scotland’s Chief Statistician today published Homicide in Scotland, 2024-25. The publication provides information on crimes of homicide recorded by the police in Scotland in 2024-25. The main findings are: In 2024-25, 45 victims of homicide were recorded, 21% (or 12 victims) less than the 57 victims recorded in 2023-24. This is the lowest number of recorded homicide victims since comparable records began in 1976.

Over the latest 20-year period from 2005-06 to 2024-25, the number of homicide victims in Scotland fell by 53% (or 51 victims) from 96 to 45. The greatest reduction in homicide victims over the last 20 years has been amongst young people aged 16-24. In the five years between 2005-06 to 2009-10 there were 110 victims in this age range. This dropped to 31 across the latest five years between 2020-21 to 2024-25.

https://www.gov.scot/news/homicide-in-scotland-2024-25/

In the early years of SNP government, in 2011, there were 91 homicides. The level has fallen now steadily to less than half that – 45.

While this trend will, of course be, as social scientists love to say, multifactorial, the authors of the Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett, showed in the graph above a very strong negative correlation between levels of inequality and homicide rates. Japan and the Scandinavian countries are less unequal and all have lower homicides than more unequal countries like the USA and to a lesser extent the UK.

Scotland has limited powers to reduce inequality but it has to some extent done so, under the SNP, with universal benefits such as free prescriptions, free tuition, bus passes, the child payment, better funding of public services to produce lower crime levels, shorter hospital waiting times, more affordable housing, increased school attainment by more disadvantaged groups and progressive taxation. Put together it seems more than reasonable that these will have played at least some part.

Scotland’s homicide rate is now 0.82 per 100k population. Norway is 0.72, Denmark is 0.84, Germany is 0.91, Finland is 0.98, United Kingdom is 1.15, USA is 5.76.

Source:

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/murder-rate-by-country#:~:text=The%20global%20homicide%20rate%20was%205.61%20per%20100%2C000,groups%2C%20gangs%2C%20and%20other%20criminal%20enterprises%20like%20robbery.