Number of offenders involved in serious crime has doubled in a year, National Crime Agency says

The National Crime Agency published its annual assessment yesterday, as it claimed the number of criminals involved in serious, organised crime has almost doubled in the UK over the past year.

The NCA says there are at least 350,000 offenders involved in organised crime such as fraud, drugs, trafficking and gang violence.

It also said there are now 4,772 known organised crime groups operating, with a quarter involved in violence.

The number of individual offenders, which has been given as a minimum figure, is up from 180,000 from last year, including at least 300,000 people with a sexual interest in children.

Drugs were linked to a “substantial proportion” of cases that involved serious violence.

It comes after a Yorkshire Superintendent told The Yorkshire Post last month that gangs were resorting to more “extreme” methods of violence in turf wars.

Supt Damon Solley, who is Lead for West Yorkshire Police’s Operation Jemlock, said: “The gang culture is such that if you ‘cross us’, ‘dismiss us’ or ‘encroach on our area’, then you should expect violence. Unfortunately, we are seeing that the violence is becoming more and more extreme and, in some cases, horrific.”

In yesterday’s report, NCA director Lynne Owens said it had “never been clearer” that these levels of crime posed “an international threat that disregards boundaries and borders”.

She said: “Serious and organised crime continues to kill more people than any other national security threat, and has a corrosive impact on the UK and its citizens.”

One of the high-profile cases cited in the report was the jailing of three men who ran a dark web business selling the lethal drugs fentanyl and carfentanyl, which had been mixed with bulking agents at an industrial unit in Leeds before being shipped worldwide.