The CrimeMapsUK maps show published police records as coloured hexagons, not as pins on exact addresses. Each hex is a count for an area in the selected month - either street crime or stop and search records.
Overview of the crime map, taken with the map’s earlier colours, which showed records per hex rather than records per km².
Why hexes?
Locations on data.police.uk are approximate. Before publication, coordinates are moved to nearby anonymous points, such as a street centre. Showing exact pins can suggest more precision than the data has.
Hexes keep geographic patterns visible while staying honest about that limit. The same approach is used on the stop and search map.
Reading the colours
Use the Records per km² in the month legend:
- lighter colours - fewer records for the ground a hex covers
- darker colours - more records for the ground a hex covers
A hex’s colour is its count divided by its area, so the bands mean the same at every zoom level. The crime map’s bands are under 5, 5–20, 20–80, 80–300 and 300+ records per km². Stop-and-search records are far fewer, so that map’s bands are under 1, 1–5, 5–20, 20–80 and 80+.
A large hex, shown when you zoom out, averages its busy and quiet parts. Zoom in and the records gather into smaller hexes. A busy high street reads darker, and ground with no records shows no hex at all. A zoomed-in hex covers less than a tenth of a square kilometre, so a single record there is already about 12 to 16 per km² in England and Wales. That is the crime map’s second band and the stop-and-search map’s middle band, so a quiet place can read a shade or two darker zoomed in than zoomed out. The colours are not a safety rating, and not a rate per resident.
Zoomed in, the grid gets finer, here in the map’s earlier colours. Town centres often show higher counts because more incidents are recorded there, not because the map has labelled the area “unsafe”.
Zoom changes the grid size
The crime map switches between three hex sizes, and the stop-and-search map between the smaller two:
- zoomed out to the whole country - the largest hexes, about 4.3 to 4.9 km across on the ground in England and Wales, on the crime map only
- zoomed out - larger hexes, about 1.1 to 1.2 km across on the ground in England and Wales, useful for regional patterns
- zoomed in - smaller hexes, about 300 m across on the ground in England and Wales, useful for local shape
All are a little smaller further north: about 3.8 to 4.0 km, 0.94 to 1.0 km and 236 to 256 m in northern Scotland.
If an area looks intense at a national zoom, zoom in before drawing a local conclusion. One large hex can cover several streets.
Click a hex for more detail
Clicking a hex opens a side panel with:
- the total count for that area and month
- the area the hex covers and its records per km², which set its colour
- a breakdown of published outcomes
- on the crime map, a breakdown by crime type
The selected hex also becomes more transparent, with a stronger outline, so you can see the streets underneath more clearly.
A selected hex is outlined and made lighter so the underlying map remains readable. This picture shows the map’s earlier colours.
The side panel shows totals and breakdowns for the selected hex. These are still area bins, not exact incident addresses. This picture shows the map’s earlier colours, and predates the panel’s area and records per km².
Outcomes are police status labels
The outcome shown with a street-crime record is the latest published status for that recorded crime - for example that a suspect was charged, that the case was resolved locally, or that the investigation closed with no suspect identified. It is a policing or justice status update, not a court verdict such as guilty or not guilty.
The Home Office is explicit that a charge is recorded even if the case later fails in court. Full definitions, quotes, and how CrimeMapsUK groups labels on the map are in What is a crime outcome.
A careful reading
Useful checks:
- compare nearby hexes in the same month
- zoom in before treating a colour as a neighbourhood summary
- use the panel to see which crime types or outcomes drive a high count
- use trends or crime statistics when you want change over time or a force-wide view
- see How to use the dashboards for the statistics pages that sit alongside the maps
Things to avoid:
- treating a hex as an exact address
- reading a high count as a safety score - counts are not population rates
- treating the map as a complete picture of all crime experienced
Police recorded crime only includes offences that were reported to and recorded by the police. The Office for National Statistics notes that the Crime Survey for England and Wales includes crimes that are not reported to, or recorded by, the police, and that willingness to report varies. Some offence types - especially more sensitive ones - are less completely reflected in police recorded figures than others. A quiet hex can mean fewer recorded incidents; it does not prove that nothing happened.