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: unbiased, unfiltered, and unedited. We reshape what forces already release so you can explore it. We do not invent scores, blend in third-party rankings, or wrap the figures in AI spin. The source is data.police.uk. How we process it is documented on the methodology page.
Free by design
The dashboards, maps, and articles are free. They should be free. Everything except the optional neighbourhood reports will always remain free and there will never be a subscription for anything on this website.
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 neighbourhood PDF reports: documents scoped to a postcode, a fixed radius, and a clear month window, with the method and limits written in.
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 need to make money by selling these reports because there will never be advertising 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. 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.
Fully transparent
We aim to be fully transparent about what you are looking at. Every dashboard, map, and report should make clear where the data came from, what filters or radius were applied, and which month window is in scope. When a figure is a count of published records, we say so. When a location is approximate, we say so. When an outcome is only the latest published label, we say so.
Transparency also means documenting our own choices: how months are ingested, how hexes are built, how comparisons are formed, and where the service’s limits begin. That detail lives on the methodology page and in the articles. If something is uncertain or incomplete in the source data, we would rather show the gap than paper over it.
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.
If the data is worth publishing, it is worth putting in front of people who can actually use it.