A 26% fall in theft offences drove a reduction in crime recorded by police in England and Wales.
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Crime recorded by police in England and Wales fell by 8% in 2020 as periods of lockdown caused theft reports to drop by more than a quarter, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
Firearms offences fell by 11% and knife crime dropped by 9%.
Drug offences rose by 12%, however, driven by a police crackdown in “crime hotspots” from April to June 2020.
The ONS said the “majority” of the fluctuation in crime rates during the year was due to periods of lockdown.
Homicides fell by 12%, although the decline was exaggerated by the 2019 incident when 39 Vietnamese people were found dead in Essex after they were trafficked into the UK.
Excluding that, the fall in homicides – which covers all deaths caused by another person – was 6%, with 625 offences in the year up to December 2020.
Amid concerns about the impact of lockdown on the victims of domestic violence, the number of domestic abuse offences increased by 7% to 839,077.
Sexual offences recorded by police fell by 7% in 2020 compared with the previous year, while rape offences dropped by 6% to 55,632.
The ONS said that before the fall recorded during this pandemic year, rape offences reported to police had been gradually increasing each year.
Improvements in the way police record rape offences have contributed to increases in previous years, and the ONS said that may be having a diminishing effect now.
But they said national lockdown restrictions may also have had some impact on the fall last year.