Public vastly overestimates minority ethnic involvement in UK killings, study finds

A survey of nearly two thousand people across England and Wales has exposed a striking gap between what the public believes about crime and what the numbers actually show. Researchers at King's College London asked respondents to estimate what proportion of convicted killers come from ethnic minority backgrounds. The answers came back consistently wrong. People guessed 55 percent. The real figure is 35 percent. When asked about the racial breakdown of homicides, respondents thought white people committed just 45 percent of killings. In reality, white people account for 64 percent.

The distortion was not uniform across the political spectrum. Reform voters—those backing the party that has made immigration and cultural change central to its platform—held the most warped perceptions of all. They believed 70 percent of killers were from ethnic minorities, a gap of 35 percentage points from reality and 10 points wider than supporters of any other major party. The pattern repeated itself when the survey turned to foreign national offenders. The public estimated they made up 25 percent of the prison population; the actual figure is 12 percent. On sexual offences committed by foreign nationals, respondents guessed 30 percent when the true number is 15 percent. Reform voters again led the way in overestimation, believing half of all sexual offences were committed by foreign nationals—a claim 20 percentage points higher than what Conservative voters believed.

Professor Bobby Duffy, who led the research, offered an explanation rooted in psychology rather than ignorance. Misperceptions, he argued, flow from what people worry about. Concern about immigration and diversity doesn't simply follow from accurate knowledge of crime statistics; it shapes which facts people notice and remember. Someone anxious about these issues will naturally give more weight to news stories, social media posts, and political messaging that confirm their fears. The media diet people consume—whether mainstream news, social platforms, or political communications—tends to amplify examples that fit existing worries. The result is a feedback loop where emotion drives perception, and perception is reinforced by selective exposure to information.

The survey uncovered another troubling belief taking hold: the idea of two-tier justice. More than half of respondents, 52 percent, thought ethnic or religious minorities received different sentences for the same crimes. Of those, 29 percent believed minorities got off more leniently, while 23 percent thought they faced harsher punishment. Duffy warned that these unfounded beliefs matter. People who accept two-tier justice claims become more likely to question the legitimacy of the criminal system itself and to demand radical change. When those demands rest on false premises, the result can be policy shifts that are neither necessary nor effective. Trust in institutions, he noted, depends partly on the public believing the system works fairly—and that belief erodes when people are convinced of injustice that doesn't exist.

One finding stood out as particularly revealing about how these misperceptions form. When researchers looked at age groups, they found that generational cohort mattered far more than race. Generation Z respondents estimated that white people committed 58 percent of homicides; baby boomers put the figure at 35 percent. Yet when comparing white and non-white respondents within the same age group, their answers were nearly identical. This suggests that the information environment people inhabit—the news they see, the conversations they have, the cultural moment they live in—shapes their understanding more powerfully than personal experience or identity.

The survey also revealed that people overestimate their own exposure to crime. Respondents guessed that 27 percent of people had personally experienced crime in the previous year. The actual figure was 9.7 percent. Duffy described these misperceptions as expressions of emotional anxiety rather than the product of careful study. The public's estimates, he said, are messages about what worries them. At a moment when far-right parties across Europe and North America are explicitly trying to link crime to ethnicity and immigration to win votes, understanding how those perceptions form—and how far they can drift from reality—has become urgent. The gap between what people believe and what is true creates space for political movements to thrive.