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Which UK airport has the most passenger arrests?

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As you can imagine, our inboxes overflow daily with the results of spurious ‘surveys’ and ‘research findings’, all conducted by companies who think they can get a bit of cheap publicity. We delete virtually all of them.

This one, though, made me sit up with its sheer originality and I felt we should share it.

Which UK airport has the most passenger arrests? Where are you most likely to find shoplifters, pickpockets and people keen to commit assault?

Here are the results. Note that Scottish airports are excluded because Police Scotland refused to co-operate with the enquiry. Would that have changed the results?

Yes, it is the people of South Yorkshire who won the ‘top crims’ award for 2019-2021.

The top offences at Doncaster Sheffield were shoplifting, theft, and ‘assault without injury’. The good news is that the crime statistics in Doncaster as a whole are now likely to drop following the closure of the airport at the end of the month ….

Over at Birmingham, potentially due to the greater number of long haul flights, the top cause of arrest was passengers trying to do a runner having had a warrant issued against them.

Leeds Bradford picks up the third spot due to a substantial number of violent attacks inside the terminal, which was the No 1 cause of arrest. It also scores highly for fraud-related arrests

The study was put together by luggage storage company Bounce. Freedom of Information Act requests were made to the relevant police forces serving each mainland airport for the period 2019 – 2021. Police Scotland did not provide any data. As this covers periods of covid closure, the ‘arrests per million passengers’ number is more relevant than the total number of arrests.

Category

General

Comments (52)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • KevinS says:
    17 Oct17 October 08:09

    Yorkshire, Yorkshire!

  • Neil says:
    17 Oct17 October 08:51

    Haha a VERY QUESTIONABLE set of statistics!

    In what world does Birmingham have 18m pax annually and Belfast International have 10m pax annually?

    Birminghams record is 13.0m in 2017 and Belfasts record is 6.2m in 2019…

    18m is more likely Manchester / Stansted and 10m is more likely Birmingham

    • danyal says:
      17 Oct17 October 09:03

      2019-2021. Read the article properly.

    • Nick says:
      17 Oct17 October 09:14

      @Neil, it makes perfect sense, you just need to think for a minute. Regular passenger stats are always calculated based on departing pax only. But you can be arrested either leaving or arriving, so for a decent benchmark they would need to use figures for both sets combined. Hence I expect the passenger totals to be roughly double what they would normally be.

      • Neil says:
        17 Oct17 October 10:17

        No they are not. Regular Pax states are based on both Arrival and Departing Passangers!

    • iain says:
      17 Oct17 October 09:17

      its 2109-2021 – 2 years

      • Neil says:
        17 Oct17 October 09:31

        Hadnt notices that, that makes more sense…

        Though VERY sceptical that there are no MAG airports on the list (MAN/STN) or LTN on the list! The fact that Norwich with 8 arrests in 2 years is at Number 10 surely is questionable???

        • KevinS says:
          17 Oct17 October 10:06

          Not really. It’s arrests per million.

        • Chas says:
          17 Oct17 October 10:40

          I think you need to look again at how the table works. Norwich isn’t no. 10 based on 8 arrests – it’s in that position based on 10.3 arrests per million….

  • Navara says:
    17 Oct17 October 09:46

    Wish me luck later

  • Vasco says:
    17 Oct17 October 09:48

    Did Gary Leff guest-write this post?

  • Lorraine says:
    17 Oct17 October 10:05

    Another HfP articles written with the writer’s Unconscious Bias (or maybe they are conscious of it and don’t care) clearly on show. Disappointing.

    • Rhys says:
      17 Oct17 October 10:09

      Rob was born in Sheffield! The tone is clearly tongue in cheek…

    • KevinS says:
      17 Oct17 October 11:07

      What unconscious bias?

      • Chas says:
        17 Oct17 October 13:11

        Exactly – there is none. The OP has confused making a statement that a Yorkshire airport tops this crime table with having a chip on the shoulder about the north. It seems to me that if anyone has a chip on their shoulder it’s [best left unfinished….]

  • Julian says:
    17 Oct17 October 11:00

    Noting that the Heathrow and Gatwick figures are very similar despite the now different airport operators I suspect it probably has a lot more to do with the relative level of Police and Border Force resources to passenger numbers and their relative proactiveness at smaller airports like London City and Doncaster. My experience of London City is that Border Force is much more proactive there about checking inbound baggage contents than at Gatwick or Heathrow. And whilst it isn’t in the list I have also historically found Border Force or predecessors at Luton especially proactive about checking inbound luggage after leaving the customs/luggage collection hall.

    It probably isn’t a surprise that Norwich or Belfast International and Belfast City are at the bottom of the arrests league given that far more of the traffic is to uncontentious short haul European destinations in the Mediterranean and/or internal UK flights mainly to London.

  • newbie says:
    17 Oct17 October 11:49

    Interesting Stansted and Luton are not on the list… Which I suspect goes to the credibility of the report rather than the relative peacefulness of the two airports.

  • The Savage Squirrel says:
    17 Oct17 October 13:14

    Heh, data from FOI requests are notoriously unreliable to the point of being meaningless, as they will be interpreted differently by different respondents. Figures also will measure efficiency of data collection more sensitively than actual crime rate.

    That’s a boring a serious point, though. Nice idea for a tongue-in-cheek article to wind up the easily offended, and so proud to see Yorkshire holds two steps on the podium, at least for now!

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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