Welsh police recorded 31,031 crimes in July, the highest July since at least 2020

Police in Wales recorded 31,031 crimes in July, more than in any July since at least 2020. These are crimes the four Welsh forces wrote down, which is not the same as crimes committed. The figure clears the old peak, July 2020's 29,736, and is 3,278 above last July's 27,753. It is also 12 per cent above the average July in the archive, 27,594.

Recorded crime in Wales climbs into July most years, but it has not climbed like this. The count rose 16 per cent from June to July, 26,715 to 31,031. The five earlier June to July moves in Cover's archive ran from 0.3 per cent to 6.7. Three categories carry three quarters of the gap on July 2025: violence and sexual offences, which is the Home Office's own label for that category and is wider than the word violence suggests, anti-social behaviour, which the Home Office counts alongside crimes in this file, and public order offences, meaning threatening or abusive behaviour in public.

Three of the four forces put the total up, South Wales Police by the most. Dyfed-Powys Police did not follow: alone of the four, its total fell. No force, the Home Office or the Welsh Government has published a reason for the rise, and none is invented here. The Senedd cannot supply one either. Policing policy in Wales is reserved to the UK Government, in the Senedd research service's own words, and each force answers to an elected police and crime commissioner, who sets the budget and hires the chief constable but must not influence the force's operational independence.

Those are whole force counts. Everything above covers whole police forces. Cover also counts what is recorded inside a one mile circle drawn around a city centre, a far smaller area, and both the circles it draws in south Wales, Cardiff and Newport, rose faster than Wales as a whole. Cardiff recorded 1,649 crimes in July against 1,294 a year earlier, up 27 per cent, and Newport 1,022 against 788, up 30 per cent. Each is the highest July of the four Cover has captured on that measure, which does not reach back before 2023. Cardiff's rise was 355 crimes, and violence and sexual offences, up 99, and shoplifting, up 93, were more than half of it. Anti-social behaviour, up 113, led Newport's.

None of these counts measures crime committed. A rise in recorded crime can mean police are logging more of what the public reports, rather than that more is happening. The Office for National Statistics found exactly that for England and Wales between the years ending March 2015 and March 2019, putting the rise mainly down to improvements in recording practice, and violence with and without injury, the statistics agency's own grouping, was where those improvements told hardest. A wider category, violence and sexual offences, is the one leading Wales in July. The July file was published on 3 September, thirty-four days after the month ended. The counts themselves rarely change, but data.police.uk says its outcomes file commonly carries updates for crimes recorded many months earlier, so what happened next in these cases will keep moving.