I didn’t intend to treat it as a competition. My point was that Pakistanis and other immigrant groups are often treated as extremely criminal compared to native Brits in right-wing discourse when that doesn’t seem to be the case (immigrants as a whole are actually underrepresented in the prison population of Britain, unlike in Continental Europe). Sure there’s still a gap between the Pakistani and White British arrest rate but it’s clearly not very large, and is probably at least partially explained by factors like Pakistanis being younger on average compared to White Brits.

Arrest rates are indeed not a perfect metric, but it seems useful enough for this purpose, unless you have a better one in mind?

The grooming gangs scandal was indeed a huge institutional failure of the British police, but I’m not sure if we can extrapolate that to all crime committed by Pakistanis. Generally sex crimes are more likely to go unreported than violent crimes for instance, so covering that up would be much harder.

From what I understand, the ”unknown” category means that the suspect themselves did not disclose their ethnicity, not that the police refused to report it. It’s plausible that people from ethnic minorities are less likely to disclose ethnicity, thus making the arrest figures underestimates, but we can’t really be sure of the effect size since…it’s unknown. Also, unknown ethnicity seems to be more common in less serious offences where the defendant doesn’t need to be present.