Area alerts are a free email, sent once a month, about published police records for one postcode district. Sign up on the area alerts page, or from the alerts box on a district page.
Signing up takes two steps
Enter your email address and a postcode district or full postcode, then tick the consent box. We email you a confirmation link that works for 7 days. No alerts are sent until you open it and press Confirm monthly alerts. If you did not ask for alerts, ignore the email.
Each sign-up covers one district. We send at most one confirmation email a day to any address.
What one email contains
Each alert covers one published month for your district:
- the number of published street-crime records that month
- how that compares with the month before and with the same month a year earlier
- the three largest crime categories that month
- a link to the district’s page, with its full figures
Each email also says that the counts are published police records with approximate locations, not all crime and not a safety score. To unsubscribe, open the link in any alert and press Unsubscribe. Mail apps that show their own unsubscribe button can use that instead.
Alerts go out after a new month of police data is published on data.police.uk and loaded onto the site.
Why a month can be held back
Police data sometimes arrives incomplete. A force may publish less than its usual month, or parts of the download can come back empty. An email built on that data would show a fall that never happened. So before sending, we compare a force’s or a district’s total for the month with the median of its own monthly totals in the 12 calendar months before. A month in that span with no published records is left out of the median. The checks are:
- If the month did not load completely, no alerts go out for it.
- If a force’s total for the month is under half its median, alerts are held for every district where that force supplied at least 5% of the records in those 12 months. While a force is held, a district is also held if we cannot yet tell which forces supplied its records.
- If a district’s own total is under a quarter of its median, its alert is held. This check applies only where that median is at least 20 records.
- A district without a published page, for example one whose own records show a publication gap, gets no alert.
- You can sign up for a district with most of its postcodes in a force that publishes no street-level crime, such as one in Greater Manchester. Nothing is sent until police publish records for it again; then the monthly alerts start. The page you see after confirming has an unsubscribe link, so you can stop before the first email.
We would rather send nothing than send a total that looks like a sudden drop.
Your data
We store your email address and district only to send these alerts, and we never add them to analytics. The privacy policy lists what we keep and how to have it deleted.