Postcode district, postcode sector, council area, and police force area pages on CrimeMapsUK show published street-crime records per 1,000 residents. A count on its own makes a large area look busier than a small one. A rate lets you compare a district of 8,000 people with one of 40,000.
How the rate is built
The rate takes an area’s published street-crime records, including anti-social behaviour, over its last 12 published months. It divides them by the area’s usual residents in Census 2021 and multiplies by 1,000. A district with 2,400 records and 20,000 residents has a rate of 120.0.
Residents come from the ONS Census 2021 postcode headcounts for England and Wales. Each published record within 5 km of a postcode is assigned to the nearest one, so the residents of a district or sector are the residents of exactly the postcodes its records are assigned to. A council area’s residents are those of every postcode the ONS Postcode Directory places in it. We add them up ourselves, so the total can differ slightly from the council’s official population. The records and the residents cover the same ground.
District, sector, and council area pages compare the rate with the area’s main force and with England and Wales. Force area pages compare with England and Wales. The records and residents sit beside each rate. Only records from the 43 police forces of England and Wales count towards a rate. British Transport Police records still appear in an area’s counts, but not in its rate.
Residents, not visitors
The rate divides by the people who live in an area, not the people who spend time there. A city centre, a station, or a retail park can have thousands of visitors a day and a few hundred residents. Records involving visitors count against the residents alone, so the rate overstates crime per person present.
Residents are counted at March 2021, while the records are current. An area with many homes built since then can read higher.
When a rate is not shown
A page shows no rate, and says why, when:
- the area has fewer than 1,000 residents
- its district or its force is in a publication gap, so recent months would read as a quieter area
- more than 10% of its records sit at postcodes created after Census Day 2021, whose residents the census could not count
- a month is missing from its last 12 months, or those months are still being rebuilt
- it is in Northern Ireland, which runs its own census, not loaded here
- a tenth or more of its postcodes are policed by a force that data.police.uk lists as publishing no street-level crime, such as Greater Manchester Police, while that force is missing recent months, so its records cover only part of its residents
Rates in neighbourhood reports
A neighbourhood report shows no rate for its circle of about 0.5 km, because the circle cuts through postcodes. Its page called “The wider area” gives the rates of the postcode’s sector and district instead.
A rate is not a safety score
Two districts with the same rate can have very different records, such as shoplifting around a retail park in one and burglary on residential streets in the other. Read the category mix beside the rate. The full method is under records per 1,000 residents on the methodology page.