Why this exists
Police forces publish street crime and stop-and-search data, and that is genuinely good. But data is not open in any meaningful sense if ordinary people cannot interpret it. Most people cannot download huge monthly files, clean them, map approximate locations, and check outcomes without specialist tools. If the public cannot look at the data and investigate what is there, “open data” is only open in theory.
CrimeMapsUK exists to make that published data accessible. We reshape what forces already release so you can explore it. We do not invent scores or blend in third-party rankings. The crime source is the official police data portal (data.police.uk). Area pages also show other official open data beside the crime figures, never blended into them: Census 2021 residents for per-resident rates, deprivation indices, and on district pages, house prices (HM Land Registry), schools (Department for Education), flood risk (Environment Agency), and broadband (Ofcom). How we process each source is documented on the methodology page.
Free by design
The dashboards, maps, area pages, and articles are free, and they will stay free with no subscription. The 12-month neighbourhood report is free too.
This is a lot of data, and keeping it loaded, updated, mapped, and searchable takes real infrastructure and ongoing work. CrimeMapsUK supports that work by selling the 5-year and Move reports and report packs: PDFs scoped to a postcode, a fixed radius, and a clear month window, with the method and limits written in. Business API plans are monthly subscriptions with published prices.
Those reports are aimed at people who are already spending money on a home decision (buying, renting, or letting) and want a documented local summary they can keep. They add value beyond the rest of the website, but in our view, do not constitute information that must be open access. These reports do not paywall the open exploration of the same underlying published data.
We make money by selling these reports and API access. There will never be display ads on this site. There will never be selling of user data or third-party tracking. We try to collect as little as possible and do not want to know who you are. Product analytics, where used, is self-hosted and kept away from report references, emails, and postcodes. It does count visits to public area pages, whose addresses include a postcode district or sector code. See the privacy policy for details.
Who it is for
This can and should be a resource for ordinary citizens: anyone who wants to see what was recorded near them, or across a force, without needing a data science background.
It is also for people moving home, buying, or letting a place, who want published patterns in context rather than a marketing “safety score”. Journalists and researchers can use the same free tools to compare forces, months, and categories without wrangling every CSV by hand. Letting and estate agents can use neighbourhood reports where a client needs a shareable document, without that becoming the only way to see the data.
What we will not do
We will not rank neighbourhoods as safe or unsafe. We will not pretend approximate police locations are exact addresses. We will not hide the limits of recorded crime: under-reporting, force differences, and outcome lag are real, and they stay in the copy. Short answers live in the FAQ.