Has anti-social behaviour gone up?

The Crime Survey for England and Wales says it has. More people told the survey they had experienced or witnessed anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the year to March 2026 than in the year before. Part of that rise came from a change to the questionnaire. Police-recorded ASB and the street-level records this site maps measure different things, and need not move with the survey.

What the Crime Survey found

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) asks people aged 16 and over who live in households about their experiences of crime in the past year, whether or not anyone told the police. It also asks whether they experienced or witnessed ASB.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its bulletin for the year ending March 2026 on 23 July 2026. It estimates that 40.9% of people experienced or witnessed ASB. That was a statistically significant rise from 35.5% the year before, and about the level of the year ending March 2020.

The 40.9% is a share of people, not a count of incidents. It cannot be broken down to a street or a postcode.

ONS published its next bulletin, for the year ending June 2026, on 22 October 2026. This article uses the year to March, the year ONS’s questionnaire study covers.

Part of the rise came from a questionnaire change

The survey takes each person down one of four routes through the interview. In April 2025 it removed questions on household security from Route B and on vehicle security from Route C, to make space for other questions later in the survey. On those two routes, the removed questions had come directly before the ASB questions. Routes A and D changed very little in that part of the survey.

ONS measured the effect in a methodology article published on 25 August 2026:

Experiencing or witnessing ASB rose on all four routes.
It rose by 4 to 5 percentage points on Routes A and D, and by 6 to 7 on Routes B and C.
Leaving out Routes B and C, the rise was 4.4 percentage points, against 5.4 for the whole sample.

ONS concludes that most of the rise was genuine, but that the change inflated it. The effect was fairly small, so ONS will keep basing its estimates on the whole sample.

Police-recorded ASB is a separate count

The survey counts people who say they experienced or witnessed ASB, whether or not they told anyone. Police figures count the incidents forces recorded, and forces record in different ways. A rise in the survey need not appear in police figures.

What this site shows

CrimeMapsUK does not use the Crime Survey or the national count of police-recorded ASB. Its maps, area pages and reports use the monthly street-level files on data.police.uk. Each file lists the crime and ASB incidents a force published for the month, at an approximate location. ASB is one category in those files.

These records differ from the national figures, and have limits of their own:

They hold only what forces recorded and published. The survey also counts what nobody reported to the police.
Each location is moved to the nearest anonymous map point before release, so several incidents can share one point. See What is a street crime.
An event can count as ASB in the survey and be recorded as a crime, such as a public order offence, in the police files. It can also go unrecorded.
A force that stops publishing leaves a gap that looks like a quiet area. Our loaded data has no street-level records from Greater Manchester Police for any month from July 2019 to August 2026 except August 2022, from British Transport Police for February 2025 to August 2026, or from Gloucestershire Constabulary for February to August 2026. See when police forces stop publishing street-level crime data.
data.police.uk lists “Double counting of ASB and Crime” as a known issue. It suspects “there may be six police forces who are duplicating certain types of ASB incidents in their uploads”, and does not name them. ASB records carry no ID, so we can’t tell a repeated incident from a second one at the same map point. We keep every ASB row, so any duplicates are counted. We drop a repeat only when it carries the same crime ID as another row, which ASB rows never do, or when a stop and search file lists every search two or three times over.

Rates per 1,000 residents

Postcode district, postcode sector, council area and police force area pages show one rate: published street-crime records, including ASB, per 1,000 residents counted in Census 2021, over the area’s last 12 published months. What crime per 1,000 residents means explains how it is built and when a page withholds it. No area page shows a rate for ASB alone.

The crime rate rankings have an anti-social behaviour view. It ranks postcode districts in England and Wales, and each force’s districts and sectors, by published ASB records per 1,000 residents. An area with no published ASB records ranks at 0.0. The council area rankings and the England and Wales page use the overall rate.

Every rate here counts residents, not visitors. Town centres, stations and retail parks can rank high because many people pass through and few live there.

Checking ASB for a place

Search the postcode on the crime map and pick a month. Darker hexes hold more published records. See How to interpret the hex maps.
Select a hex to see its categories and their counts, including ASB.
Open the postcode’s district page or council area page for its rate, its main categories and its months.
Compare with the force area, for example Crime in London or Crime in Birmingham & West Midlands. Crime in Manchester explains why Greater Manchester shows no figures.
If a force’s monthly chart drops away or has missing months, read the map as incomplete publishing, not as ASB falling.
For a 0.5 km circle around one postcode, a neighbourhood report lists the categories, including ASB, with the same limits as the map.

What the survey figure does not mean

It does not mean 40.9% of people on your street experienced ASB.
It does not mean the police recorded 40.9% of people as victims of ASB.
It does not mean the street-level records on this site rose by 5.4 percentage points.

The England and Wales page sets out how the published records differ from the official statistics.