The Nottingham balaclava ban would cover the entire city centre. Dispatch Times pulled every crime recorded inside that area for the last three years, and found the order is aimed at the one category that has been falling.
Council leader Neghat Khan confirmed last week that a balaclava ban could be added to a new Public Spaces Protection Order after residents raised the issue in consultation. The order itself, which runs for three years, targets what the council calls nuisance behaviour: busking that causes unreasonable disturbance, unauthorised requests for money, and street collections in restricted areas. It is part of a plan Ms Khan says will make Nottingham the safest city in the country, announced alongside the 2050 Nottingham Vision.
The ambition is not in question. Whether this instrument reaches the problem is.
What we did
Every police force in England and Wales publishes street-level crime records through the Home Office open data service. Each record carries a category, a month, an approximate location and, for most offences, an outcome.
We queried every crime recorded within one mile of Old Market Square — the centre of the area the order covers — for the 36 months from July 2023 to June 2026, the most recent month published. That is 54,485 individual crime records. We then grouped them into three twelve-month blocks so seasonal noise cancels out, and compared the first block with the last.
Anyone can reproduce this. The coordinates are 52.9536, −1.1505, and the data is free.
The category the order targets is the one already falling
Anti-social behaviour — the umbrella category that covers the street nuisance a PSPO exists to address — fell by almost a third across the three years, from 4,531 recorded incidents to 3,097. Nothing else in the dataset fell at all.
| Category | Jul 2023 – Jun 2024 | Jul 2025 – Jun 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-social behaviour | 4,531 | 3,097 | −31.6% |
| Robbery | 274 | 551 | +101.1% |
| Shoplifting | 2,148 | 2,833 | +31.9% |
| Theft from the person | 384 | 471 | +22.7% |
| Violent crime | 4,266 | 5,069 | +18.8% |
| Public order | 1,167 | 1,329 | +13.9% |
| Possession of weapons | 242 | 250 | +3.3% |
| All crime | 17,504 | 19,032 | +8.7% |
One caveat, stated plainly: two months in the series — September 2024 and May 2026 — record anti-social behaviour at roughly a third of the level of the months either side of them, which looks like under-reporting rather than a real collapse. Strip May 2026 out entirely and the decline over the period is still 28 per cent. The direction does not depend on the anomaly.
What rose instead
Robbery in the city centre has doubled. In the year to June 2024 there were 274 recorded robberies within that one-mile radius. In the year to June 2026 there were 551. The monthly figures show where the shift happened: robbery ran in the high teens and twenties through 2023 and 2024, then broke upward in spring 2025 and has not come back down. March 2026 recorded 62, the highest month in the series.
Theft from the person is up 23 per cent, violent crime up 19 per cent, shoplifting up 32 per cent. Overall crime in the area is up 8.7 per cent while the specific thing the order names is down by nearly a third.
This is the gap between what makes a city feel unsafe and what a Public Spaces Protection Order is built to reach. Busking and begging are visible. Robbery is what actually rose.
The case for the ban is stronger than the order that carries it
There is a real argument for treating concealed faces as a policing problem, and the outcome data makes it better than the council has so far made it.
Of the 551 robberies recorded in the area in the last twelve months, 244 — 44.3 per cent — were closed with the outcome “investigation complete; no suspect identified”. Another 24.7 per cent ended as “unable to prosecute suspect”. Two resulted in a caution. For theft from the person the identification failure is worse still: 69.2 per cent of the 471 offences closed with no suspect identified at all.
In other words, in the crimes that have risen fastest, the single most common ending is that nobody was ever identified. A garment worn specifically to defeat identification is not an irrational thing for a council to worry about.
Ms Khan put the concern in terms of how it feels rather than how it clears: people on e-bikes in balaclavas in 32-degree heat, she told the BBC, is “not acceptable” and does not make people feel safe. She also acknowledged religious dress as a distinct question. The enforcement numbers would have been the stronger argument.
What a PSPO can and cannot do
Public Spaces Protection Orders come from Part 4 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. They last up to three years, can be extended, and breaching one is a criminal offence — punishable by a fixed penalty notice of up to £100, or a fine of up to £1,000 on conviction.
That is the tool. A £100 ticket, issued largely by council enforcement officers, aimed at someone already prepared to commit robbery. It is difficult to see the deterrent reaching the 62 robberies recorded in March.
There is also a power that already exists and is not being discussed. Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 lets a police officer require a person to remove any item being worn wholly or mainly to conceal identity, in an area where an authorisation is in force. Refusing is an arrestable offence. Police in Nottingham can already order a balaclava removed where they believe it is being worn to hide who someone is — no new order required, and with a police officer rather than a council officer making the call.
What a city-centre ban would add is the ability to penalise the garment itself, regardless of intent. That is a genuine change, and it is where the religious and practical exemptions Ms Khan raised will have to be resolved — along with the more mundane question of a cyclist in winter.
The wider context
The reputational pressure behind all this is real. Ms Khan referred to a report placing Nottingham as the seventh most unsafe place in the country, and said she would not rest until it was the safest. The city has also carried the memory of specific cases, including the 2024 murder of 24-year-old Jack Edwards at Sussex Street skate park by two attackers in balaclavas, aged 13 and 19, jailed for four and a half years and 14 years respectively.
Cases like that shape policy because they should. But the three-year record for the square mile in question shows a city centre where street nuisance has genuinely receded and acquisitive violence has moved in behind it — a pattern visible in other UK town centres, and one that has produced street attacks in ordinary daytime settings and violence arising from trivial public disputes elsewhere in the country.
What to watch
Three things will show whether this works.
First, whether the balaclava clause survives the shorter second consultation Ms Khan said would be held. Second, whether the council publishes enforcement figures — how many fixed penalty notices are actually issued under the order, and for what. PSPOs are frequently made and rarely counted. Third, and the only measure that settles it: whether robbery within that one-mile radius comes back down toward the twenty-a-month it ran at before spring 2025.
The data is published monthly and it is free. We will keep checking.
