About CrimeMapsUK

Current data coverage

Coverage spans 3 months of published street crime data, from January 2026 to March 2026.

Where the data comes from

All data displayed on CrimeMapsUK is sourced from data.police.uk, the official open-data platform maintained by the Home Office. This includes street-level crime, crime outcomes, and stop-and-search records published by individual police forces across England and Wales.

What the service includes

Dashboards

Interactive pages for crime statistics, stop and search statistics, trends, and comparisons — all built from the same published data.

View dashboards

Maps

Hex-grid maps showing crime and stop-and-search records where location data is available, so you can see geographic patterns at a glance.

View maps

Neighbourhood reports

PDF reports scoped to a postcode, with a documented radius, time period, and transparent methodology.

View reports

Who this is for

Residents and home movers

Research crime patterns around a postcode before buying, renting, or simply to stay informed about your area.

Journalists and researchers

Analyse policing data across forces, time periods, and demographics without needing to wrangle raw CSV downloads.

Letting agents and estate agents

Generate professional, co-branded neighbourhood reports to share with clients as part of your property due diligence.

Transparency and impartiality

CrimeMapsUK is built on a simple principle: the public should be able to see the same policing data that forces publish, presented clearly and without editorial spin. We believe open data only works when it is genuinely accessible.

The source data has known limitations — approximate locations, incomplete recording, and variation between forces. We document these clearly rather than hiding them. The methodology section below explains the processing steps and caveats in full.

Methodology

This section explains where the data comes from, how we collect and process it, how maps and reports are built, and the limitations you should keep in mind when using the service.

Data source

All data displayed on CrimeMapsUK is sourced from data.police.uk, the official open-data platform maintained by the Home Office. The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

We collect three types of record:

Street-level crime

Individual crime records published by police forces across England and Wales, categorised by type (for example, violent crime, burglary, or anti-social behaviour). Each record includes an approximate location, a crime category, and an outcome status where available.

Stop and search

Records of stop-and-search encounters, including the date, approximate location, legislation used, object of the search, and the outcome of the encounter.

Crime outcomes

Outcome records linked to individual crimes by a persistent reference identifier. These show the final recorded outcome category and the month it was assigned, which may differ from the month the crime was originally recorded.

How data is collected

Data is ingested from the data.police.uk API using an automated pipeline. The pipeline runs for each monthly release and works as follows:

1. The list of active police forces is fetched from the API.
2. For each force, stop-and-search records are downloaded by force identifier. Street crime and outcome records are downloaded by geographic area using polygon coordinates that cover each force's jurisdiction.
3. Larger force areas (for example, the Metropolitan Police area and Surrey) are split into smaller geographic tiles to avoid exceeding the API's response limits.
4. Requests are rate-limited to 15 per second, with automatic retry and exponential backoff for failed or throttled requests.
5. Records are inserted into the database using PostgreSQL bulk operations. Street crime data for a given month is replaced atomically — the existing month's records are deleted and new records are inserted within a single database transaction, so a failed import cannot leave the table empty.

Deduplication

Each record is assigned a SHA-256 hash derived from all of its data fields. This hash is used to identify duplicate records. If the same record appears in overlapping API responses (for example, where force area tiles overlap), the duplicate is detected and only one copy is stored.

For stop-and-search data, a unique constraint on the hash column prevents duplicate insertion at the database level. For street crime data, each monthly import replaces the full month, so duplicates within a month are naturally eliminated.

Location data

Coordinates published by data.police.uk are not exact incident locations. Before publication, the Home Office snaps each coordinate to a nearby anonymous map point — typically the centre of a street or a local landmark. This means that multiple incidents may share the same published coordinate, and no individual address can be identified from the data.

Coordinates are stored using the WGS 84 coordinate reference system (SRID 4326). Where PostGIS is available, spatial indexes and geography columns are used for efficient radius and bounding-box queries. Where PostGIS is not available, the service falls back to bounding-box filtering with haversine distance calculations in Python.

Maps and hex grid summarisation

The interactive maps display crime and stop-and-search density using a hexagonal grid rather than showing individual incident markers. This approach protects the approximate nature of the location data and provides a clearer picture of geographic patterns.

Hex grids are pre-computed using the PostGIS ST_HexagonGrid function at two zoom levels:

Overview level

Hexagons with a 1,100-metre edge length, used when the map is zoomed out. Each hexagon shows the total count of incidents and a breakdown by outcome category.

Detail level

Hexagons with a 275-metre edge length, used when the map is zoomed in past a threshold. This provides finer geographic resolution while still aggregating multiple incidents per cell.

For each hexagon, incidents are classified into outcome categories. Street crime outcomes are grouped into positive (charge, caution, penalty notice), local resolution, and negative (no suspect identified, investigation incomplete). Stop-and-search outcomes are grouped into positive, action taken, and nothing found.

Hex summaries are rebuilt automatically after each monthly data ingest.

Dashboard calculations

Dashboards present grouped totals, rates, and comparisons calculated directly from stored records. Available filters vary by dashboard but typically include police force, time period, crime category, and age range.

All dashboard queries are cached for 15 minutes. This means that the figures shown may lag slightly behind the most recent database update, but will never be more than 15 minutes out of date during normal operation.

Neighbourhood reports

Neighbourhood PDF reports are scoped to a postcode and a fixed search radius. The report process works as follows:

1. The postcode is geocoded to a latitude and longitude representing the postcode centroid.
2. A search radius of 0.5 kilometres is applied. All street crime records with published coordinates within this radius are selected. The radius query uses PostGIS ST_DWithin on geography columns for accurate distance measurement, with a bounding-box pre-filter for efficiency.
3. The time window depends on the report tier: 12 months for Essential reports, 60 months for Standard, 24 months for Professional, and all available data for Premium.
4. Selected crimes are aggregated by category, month, outcome status, and location. The report includes a breakdown of crime types, a month-by-month trend, the most frequently occurring locations, and an outcome resolution rate.
5. Local crime category shares are compared against the wider police force area and against England and Wales as a whole. The national benchmark uses ONS Crime in England and Wales figures (rates per 1,000 population, year ending March 2025) to compute the expected share of each crime type nationally.
6. The report includes two static maps: a coverage map showing the search area, and a density map showing where incidents are concentrated within the radius.

National comparison method

Where reports and dashboards compare local figures against national averages, the comparison uses ONS published crime rates for England and Wales (year ending March 2025) and recorded crime figures from data.police.uk.

Category-mix benchmarking compares the share of each crime type in the local area against the share nationally. For example, if violent crime makes up 35% of local incidents but 28% nationally, that difference is reported as a percentage-point deviation. This method compares the composition of crime rather than the absolute volume, because population data is not available at the small-area level needed for per-capita rates.

Police-area comparison follows the same method but uses the full set of published incidents for the relevant constabulary in the same time window as the baseline.

Important limitations

The source data has known limitations. We document these rather than hiding them.

Approximate locations

Published coordinates are snapped to anonymous map points by the Home Office before publication. They should not be treated as exact incident addresses. Multiple incidents may share the same published coordinate.

Recorded crime only

The data represents crimes recorded by police, not all crime experienced. Under-reporting varies by crime type — for example, fraud and domestic abuse are significantly under-reported relative to their true prevalence.

Force-to-force variation

Recording practices differ between police forces. Changes in recording standards (such as the 2014 uplift in violence recording) can cause apparent increases or decreases that reflect policy changes rather than real changes in crime levels.

Outcome labels are not court results

Outcome categories shown are those published by police forces at the time of recording. They are not the same as court verdicts, sentences, or the full case history. Outcomes may be updated or revised after initial publication.

Recent months may be revised

Police forces can revise or backfill published records after the initial release. Figures for recent months may change as forces update their submissions.

No population-based rates at small areas

Neighbourhood reports and maps show incident counts and category shares rather than per-capita rates. Reliable small-area population denominators are not available at the resolution needed, so direct rate comparisons between areas of different sizes or populations should be made with care.

Open data and licensing

The policing data used by this service is published by the Home Office under the Open Government Licence v3.0. National comparison figures are derived from ONS Crime in England and Wales statistics. The England and Wales population reference used for national rates is approximately 60.2 million (2023 mid-year estimate).

If you have questions about the data or methodology, or if you believe something on this page is inaccurate, please get in touch.