It added a double caveat, pointing out that while "the police have reported improving their reporting of sexual offences … it is known that a high proportion of sexual offences are not reported to the police".
The aim of the initiative was to improve levels of reporting of sexual offences, and to create an environment on public transport that does not tolerate intimidation and sexual harassment.
Since the public launch of Project Guardian earlier this year, there has been a 20% increase in the reporting of sexual offences on the transport network compared with the same period last year.
Simon Pope, the WSPA's UK director of campaigns and communications, said: "This separate classification for the reporting of wildlife offences is an important first step towards the UK being able to create a true picture of the scale of this exploitative and abhorrent crime".
The National Police Chiefs Councill (NPCC) said while any rise in hate crime was concerning, the latest figures also reflected success in improving the reporting of such offences.
"If Quesnelle stands, there may be a chilling effect on the reporting of sexual offences by persons with mental illness who have had prior police contact," they wrote.
The frequency of false negatives and false positives was calculated, with false positives measured as the proportion of inaccurate reporting of an offence out of all women without a record, and false negatives measured as the proportion of inaccurate offenders out of all women with a record.
However, he added: "We must be confident that the message sent to those who may be currently worried about reporting these sorts of offences is not that they are not encouraged to do so, quite the reverse: they are, and we need to make sure that those messages are clear".
She died at a time when, according to the official crime survey of England and Wales, the risk of being a victim of crime was at its lowest for 33 years - when reports of violent offences were on the decline, and in a year the Metropolitan Police recorded London's lowest number of homicides since the 1960s.
He says his human trafficking unit receives reports of 200 offences a year.
