Police crime maps are useful — and easy to misread. This guide covers how to use the CrimeMapsUK crime map and what the underlying data.police.uk locations can and cannot show.

What the map is built from

CrimeMapsUK maps published street-crime records from data.police.uk. Before publication, coordinates are snapped to anonymous points (often a street centre or public landmark). Multiple incidents can share one published point.

That is why CrimeMapsUK uses a hex grid rather than exact-looking address pins. Darker hexes mean more published records in that cell for the selected month, relative to other hexes in the current view — not a fixed national “danger” scale.

For hex-specific detail, see How to interpret the hex maps.

A practical reading order

  1. Set the month you care about. Recent months can still be revised.
  2. Zoom to the neighbourhood, not the whole country, before judging density.
  3. Click a hex for counts and category/outcome breakdowns.
  4. Compare with the force backdrop on pages such as Crime in London or the full force area list.
  5. For a postcode circle, use a neighbourhood report — the map alone is not a 0.5 km PDF scope.

What the map does not tell you

Outcome labels on related dashboards are police-published statuses, not conviction rates. See What is a crime outcome.

Common mistakes

Treating colour as a national ranking. Hex colours rescale with the current view. A dark hex in a quiet town is not the same absolute count as a dark hex in central London.

Reading a force page as a street. Force area pages use police force boundaries. Crime in London is Metropolitan Police data for most of London, not one borough.

Ignoring under-reporting. Some offence types are far less likely to appear in police records than others.

Related tools

Next step

Open the crime map, pick a month, and click a few hexes. If you need a documented postcode radius you can share with someone else, order a neighbourhood report.