On CrimeMapsUK, “street crime” means a street-level crime or anti-social behaviour (ASB) record from data.police.uk. It is not a single legal offence called “street crime”. It is the public name for individual recorded incidents published with an approximate street location.
How the police data defines it
data.police.uk describes the collection as:
Individual crime and anti-social behaviour (ASB) incidents, including street-level location information and subsequent police and court outcomes associated with the crime.
Forces upload a monthly Crime and ASB file. According to the same about page, that file typically comes from a mixture of Crime Management systems and Command and Control systems, and includes fields such as:
- date (published only as year and month)
- Home Office offence code (published as a broader crime type)
- location coordinates (anonymised before publication)
- an optional context field
That mix matters for how to read the data. Command and Control / incident systems handle a wide range of contacts — crime reports, ASB, collisions, enquiries. A Crime Management record is created when an incident is confirmed as a crime. The published street-level file is therefore recorded crime and ASB, not a complete list of every 999/101 call or every police attendance. A member of the public can report something that is recorded without officers attending; officers can attend a call that never becomes a published crime or ASB record.
The published Crime type is “one of the crime types listed in the Police.UK FAQ”. In the open data, Home Office offence codes are grouped into a smaller set of public categories — for example burglary, violent crime, theft, or anti-social behaviour — rather than every detailed offence code being shown.
What a street-level record contains on CrimeMapsUK
For each published record we typically show:
- the crime type category
- the month
- an approximate location
- the latest published outcome, where one exists
See also What is a crime outcome.
Location is approximate by design
data.police.uk is clear that published coordinates are not exact incident points:
The latitude and longitude locations of Crime and ASB incidents published on this site always represent the approximate location of a crime — not the exact place that it happened.
Exact coordinates are replaced with the nearest anonymous map point — typically the centre of a street or a public place — chosen so the catchment contains at least eight postal addresses, or none. If the nearest map point is more than 20 km away, the coordinates are zeroed out.
That is why CrimeMapsUK maps use hexagons rather than address pins. For how to read those maps, see How to interpret the hex maps.
Limitations to keep in mind
These limits come from the official data notes and from how recorded crime works:
- Recorded crime only. A street-level record exists when police recorded an incident. Offences that were never reported, or not recorded as crime/ASB, are not in the dataset. The Office for National Statistics notes that the Crime Survey for England and Wales includes crimes not reported to or recorded by the police.
- Location quality varies. data.police.uk says inconsistent geocoding policies mean location accuracy “cannot be” treated as fully consistent across forces, with force estimates of geocoding accuracy ranging from about 60% to 97%.
- Data can change. Monthly uploads are snapshots. Records may later be reclassified, have locations corrected, or be cancelled. Later changes are not always refreshed in the public files unless a force does a full resubmission.
- ASB and crime can overlap in awkward ways. data.police.uk notes a known issue that some forces may have duplicated certain ASB incidents in uploads.
- Not a population rate. Counts in an area reflect recorded incidents, not offences per resident.