Where does your data come from?
Each month Police.uk (a joint venture between the NPIA and Rock Kitchen Harris) release 86 datasets in the form of CSV files (can be opened in Excel). The 86 datasets comprise of 2 datasets (street level and neighbourhood) for each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales.
Police.uk also makes available an API, a programmatic way to get to even more data than the 86 datasets issued each month.
The 86 datasets get dumped into our databases each month, and these form the core of the table and chart data you see on the site e.g. totals by police force, totals by neighbourhood. There is then a series of procedures run against the Police.uk API that grab metadata for police forces and neighbourhoods (as there are frequent changes) so that the information you are looking at on UKCrimeStats is as current as the date of the last published datasets.
Since we cannot guarantee that the 86 monthly datasets stay the same on the Police.UK website i.e. that RKH/NPIA won't change them without telling us and/or you - we have published our raw data here which matches 100% to www.ukcrimestats.com.
In order to produce Constituency maps, heat maps and other general crime maps on UKCrimeStats it's important for us to overlay the crime data on top of a Google Map. The street level crime published by Police.uk includes an Easting/Northing reference (an approximate location of the crime designed to protect anonymity). These references are then converted into Latitude/Longtiude coordinates so that they can be displayed on a Google Map. Google Maps also provides a Geo service that we use when we need certain information e.g. coordinates of a post code.
In order to determine which Constituency (and lower administrative area e.g. councils coming soon!) we use the API provided by MySociety. MySociety has cleverly aggregated Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail and data from the Office of National Statistics in order to provide an API that makes it very easy to capture administrative boundary information.
The constituency population data comes from this spreadsheet from the Office for National Statistics and are mid-2010 estimates.
Data Quality
There is a disconnect between the street level dataset and the neighbourhood dataset provided for each police force each month. For the most part we are finding more crimes and ASB in the neighbourhood dataset than is being reported in the street level dataset. And we keep tabs on this see our free to view spreadsheet here. This, we are told by the NPIA, is explained by the fact that not all crimes that are reported can be traced to an exact location.
The differences between crimes with a location and crimes without a location, are captured in this XLS file. Since we are not provided with any other explanation as to why these totals are different we have to assume that the difference is solely explained by these extra no-location crimes.
As you can see from the XLS, the results are quite interesting. While we accept the NPIA's statement that the difference is caused by crimes without a reported location, it seems clear to us that this only explains some of the story.
Take for example, the Metropolitan police force data for January, February and March 2011. Are we expected to believe that over 101,000 crimes and ASB were reported without a location, compared to just 740 for all other months? We believe it is much more likely that the Metropolitan police had problems with the process for getting the data into the Police.UK datasets during this time. 10% is a very high figure for crimes and ASB events that have no location. And for Gwent Police, the figure is even higher at 15%. We believe the same issues happened for Surrey Police during that same period.
As you see from the XLS, there are plenty of examples where the street level data exceeds that of the neighbourhood dataset. How is this explained?
So, which dataset are you looking at?
It depends!
If you're looking at a map e.g. when you enter your postcode and see individual crimes plotted on a map within 1 mile, or when looking at any heatmap animation, you are only looking at data reported in the street crime datasets. For reasons that are clear, one has to have a location of a crime in order to plot it on a map!
Constituency (and soon to be released Council-level) maps and crime statistics are based on street level datasets (which may exclude some crimes and ASB).
If you're looking at a police force profile, or a neighbourhood profile, or the National Picture page then you're looking at the neighbourhood dataset. This, we have to believe, is the more accurate total number of crimes and ASB that are being reported.
Raw Data files
September 2026
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December 2010