The Headline Number
"Dorset Police announced that 44% of alleged sex offences in Dorset are carried out by asylum seekers living in asylum hotels." — viral social media posts, liked thousands of times, May 2026
The Audit
The number is false. Not misleading. Not out of context. Not technically-true-but-framed-badly. Dorset Police told Full Fact the figure "was incorrect and not from them." They could find no data backing it up either.
Here's what the actual data shows. Between 1 January 2025 and 31 March 2026 — a 15-month window — there were eight sexual offence reports in Bournemouth where the offender was reported to be from asylum accommodation hotels. Total sexual offences reported in Bournemouth across that same period: 808. That's approximately 1%, per Dorset Police's own figures as reported by Full Fact.
One percent versus 44%. The viral claim is off by a factor of 44.
There's also a geography problem baked into the original framing. The stat circulating online claimed to cover "Dorset." The actual data covers Bournemouth specifically — not the whole county. And it covers only asylum seekers housed in hotels, not the broader asylum-seeker population. The Home Office's own accommodation data confirms that all hotel-housed asylum seekers in Dorset were in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area anyway, so the geographic scope issue doesn't change the 1% figure — but it does illustrate how the framing was designed to sound maximally alarming.
Where did 44% come from? Full Fact couldn't trace it. No time period, no methodology, no source. It appears to have been fabricated outright.
This is the denominator problem in its most aggressive form. The viral claim doesn't just use the wrong denominator — it invents a numerator too. When you can't find the source data, that's usually because there isn't any.
By the Numbers
1% — The actual share of sexual offences in Bournemouth (Jan 2025–Mar 2026) where the offender was reported to be from asylum hotel accommodation; the viral claim said 44%, a figure Dorset Police say they never produced and cannot verify.
8 out of 808 — The raw counts behind that 1% figure; the viral stat stripped both numbers entirely, leaving only a percentage with no base rate and no source.
44x — The gap between the circulating claim and the verified data; most misleading statistics distort by a factor of two or three, which is why this one is worth flagging — it's not a rounding error, it's a fabrication.