Frequently asked questions

Start free: check your postcode on the homepage. It opens a page for the 0.5 km around the postcode with the published records of the last 12 months by category and month, their outcomes, and a map of where they cluster. You can also open the crime map, search your postcode, and zoom in. For a wider picture, browse the postcode district, council area, and force area pages. A council area covers the whole area a council runs, which can differ from the town or city it is named after. If you want a documented summary you can save or share - for example while deciding on a house or a rental - order a neighbourhood report.

Three things: how busy the immediate area is compared with its surroundings (the map), whether it is getting better or worse over time (a 5-year report or the trends dashboard), and what kinds of records dominate - burglary and vehicle crime matter differently from town-centre anti-social behaviour. The free buying guide walks through this step by step.

A 12-month report is free: we email you a link to open it; a 5-year report is £5.99; a Move report (England only) is £9.99; a pack of five 5-year vouchers is £19.99. Free reports are limited to a few per email address and per connection each day. Each report is a PDF covering the 0.5 km around your postcode: the published record counts, category mix, comparisons with the wider police force area and England and Wales, and clear notes on what the data can and cannot tell you. When Census 2021 resident data is loaded and the site has a page for your postcode's sector or district, a wider-area page adds their records per 1,000 residents and the district's deprivation mix. Without census data there is no wider-area page. Free sample PDFs, built from a real postcode, show every page.

Most reports are generated within a few minutes of your order or payment. For a free report, we email you its link and reference as soon as you submit. For a paid report, you get a status page and reference once checkout completes, and an email when the PDF is ready if you gave an address. Your reference reopens the download page any time via Find a report.

Reports are digital and delivered straight away, so you can't cancel once the PDF is ready. If a report is faulty or doesn't match what we described, email us at support@crimemapsuk.com with your report reference and we'll fix it or refund you. This does not affect your legal rights; see the terms.

No. You never need an account or subscription to use the site. Report orders give you a reference and secure link to check status and download the PDF.

No - and be wary of anything that claims to. We show the published police record and how it compares with nearby areas, clearly scoped and sourced. Whether that record is acceptable for your situation is your judgement; a “safety score” would just hide that judgement behind someone else’s formula.

A free site for exploring published UK street-crime and stop-and-search data from the official police data portal. Dashboards, maps, and articles stay free. Optional neighbourhood PDF reports help fund the service. See About.

Yes. Every crime and stop-and-search record shown here comes from the official police data portal (data.police.uk), run by the Home Office. Area pages and reports also show other official open datasets, each named beside its figures, such as Census 2021 residents, deprivation indices, sold prices, schools, flood risk and broadband. We reshape published records for search, maps, and summaries - we do not invent or alter the underlying incidents. Processing detail is on the methodology page.

CrimeMapsUK follows the published official police data portal extract for England and Wales police forces. Coverage depends on which months and forces have been loaded; current totals are on the about page.

No for the open site: dashboards, maps, area pages, and articles are free and will stay free. You never need a subscription to use them. The 12-month neighbourhood report is free with an email address. The 5-year and Move reports and report packs are paid PDFs for a documented postcode circle. District figures from our API are free without a key, within its limits. The only subscriptions we sell are the business API plans, for companies that want postcode summaries and a monthly quota without the free limits. The same underlying published data remains explorable without buying a report.

No. We present published counts and patterns. The rankings order postcode areas by published records per 1,000 residents, with the counts and caveats beside each rate. We do not label areas safe or unsafe, build a combined “crime score”, or predict crime.

No display ads, no selling of user data, and no third-party tracking. Product analytics, where used, is self-hosted and cookie-free. See the privacy page.

A PDF scoped to a postcode with a documented radius, month window, and the same published crime data used on the site - with the same location and outcome caveats. When Census 2021 resident data is loaded and the site has a page for the postcode's sector or district, a wider-area page adds their records per 1,000 residents and the district's deprivation mix. Without census data there is no wider-area page. See How to read a neighbourhood report, or order a report.

Every neighbourhood report uses a fixed 0.5 km radius around the geocoded postcode centre. It is stored as 0.31 miles, so the crime search reaches about 499 metres. That scope is printed in the PDF and cannot be changed per order.

The 12-month report answers “is the last year quiet or busy here?”. The 5-year report also answers “is that year typical?” - an area can look calm in one year and still be trending worse. The 5-year report adds year-by-year charts and an appendix of recent records. Compare the sample PDFs before choosing.

The Move report is 10 years of records plus area pages: recent sold prices from HM Land Registry and how many postcodes fall in each rivers-and-sea flood-risk band from the Environment Agency, both for postcodes whose centre lies within 0.5 km of yours; broadband availability from Ofcom for your own postcode and for those within 0.5 km; and up to eight of the nearest open schools within 2 km from the Department for Education. Distances run between postcode centres, not addresses or school gates. These are official open datasets shown as published. They are not combined with the crime figures, and they are not a survey or a valuation. Because the flood and school data cover England only, the Move report is sold for postcodes in England only. See the methodology for what each figure can and cannot tell you.

A force that published no street-level records in the last 12 months of the report's window is left out of every year, and the report names it. That way each year counts the same forces. Today that includes British Transport Police, and Greater Manchester Police, whose only street-level records since June 2019 are for August 2022. If every record in a circle comes from such forces, that report would count none, so it is not offered. A year with a missing month is starred, and a year with no published months shows N/A, not zero. Outcome labels are the latest each force had published in the data we loaded. For months before September 2021, those labels were published 12 to 35 months after the month, and many recent cases are still open. Northern Ireland does not publish stop and search to data.police.uk, and some forces missed months. The methodology gives each rule.

No. Street-crime records are recorded crime and anti-social behaviour (ASB) incidents published by police forces - not a log of every 999/101 call or every time an officer attended. Forces typically build the monthly file from Crime Management and Command and Control systems. A public report can become a record without a visit; a call-out does not always become a published crime or ASB record. See What is a street crime.

It is a published record of a stop-and-search encounter: when and roughly where it happened, the legislation and object of search, and the outcome of that search. See What is a stop and search record.

An outcome is the latest published status for a recorded crime - for example a charge, caution, local resolution, or that no suspect was identified. Outcomes can lag the original month and are not a full case file or a court verdict. See What is a crime outcome.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that 40.9% of people experienced or witnessed anti-social behaviour in the year to March 2026, up from 35.5% the year before. ONS says most of that rise was genuine, but a change to the questionnaire inflated it. The survey is separate from the street-level police records this site maps. See Has anti-social behaviour gone up?, and the crime map for published local records.

No. On CrimeMapsUK it is the share of loaded street-crime records with a police-recorded action outcome or local resolution in this dataset. It excludes many unresolved or no-further-action labels and is not a court conviction rate. Open How these figures are calculated on any dashboard for the exact definition used there.

It is the share of loaded stop-and-search records treated as a recorded find from the published outcome labels. It does not show whether a search was justified, proportionate, or effective.

Postcode district, postcode sector, council area, and police force area pages show published street-crime records (including anti-social behaviour) for the last 12 published months per 1,000 usual residents in Census 2021. Neighbourhood reports and the postcode check's result page show the rates of the postcode's sector and district where those pages publish one, never a rate for the 0.5 km circle. Each record is assigned to its nearest postcode, and the residents are those of the same postcodes. For a council area, those are the postcodes the ONS Postcode Directory places in that council area. Areas with fewer than 1,000 residents, too few for a stable rate, get no rate, and neither do areas in a publication gap or with many homes built since the census. The rate counts residents only, so it overstates crime where many people visit, such as city centres, stations, and retail parks. Rates cover England and Wales only. Maps and dashboards still show counts. See the methodology for details.

A territorial force covers a wide geography, often a county or metropolitan area, not a single neighbourhood. Force comparisons use that wider backdrop. Browse published totals on crime by police force area (for example Crime in London). See also What is a police force or constabulary.

StreetCheck was bought by CrystalRoof in March 2026. Typing streetcheck.co.uk now sends you there. CrimeMapsUK is not StreetCheck and does not replace every StreetCheck dataset, but the maps, dashboards, force pages, and articles here stay free. See What happened to StreetCheck.

Start with the free buying guide, the crime map, and a force area page. For a documented 0.5 km postcode circle, order a neighbourhood report. Conveyancing searches are separate from this site - see crime checks vs conveyancing searches.

Counts only include incidents that were reported and recorded as crime or ASB. Many offences never reach the police. Location anonymisation, force recording differences, seasonality, publication timing, and later reclassification can also change how an area appears. The Crime Survey for England and Wales covers crimes that never appear in police records.

No. Published coordinates are approximate by design - snapped to anonymous street or public points before release. That is why CrimeMapsUK uses hex grids rather than address pins. See How to interpret the hex maps.

Darker hexes mean more published records in that hex for the selected month. The colours are fixed bands of records per hex, and larger hexes, shown when you zoom out, hold more records, so they read darker. Compare colours only between hexes of the same size. The scale is not a “danger” scale and is not a rate per resident. Click a hex for totals and breakdowns.

Zoomed out, hexes are larger (regional view). Zoomed in, they get finer so local shape is easier to see. A dark large hex can cover several streets - zoom in before treating it as a neighbourhood summary.

Crime statistics and stop and search statistics summarise a selected period; Trends shows change over the loaded history; Comparisons puts two selections side by side. See How to use the dashboards.

Crime statistics and Stop and search statistics answer “what was recorded in these months?”. Trends answers “how have totals changed over the loaded history?”. Comparisons answers “how do two places or periods differ?”.

The latest loaded month is usually the most useful starting point. Use the filters to widen the range, pick one police force, or compare earlier months. Trends defaults to a longer window across the loaded history.

You choose two selections (each with its own force and month range). Presets cover common questions such as latest month vs previous month or one force vs all forces; Advanced lets you set any pair. Read the plain-English summary and paired cards before the charts. Blue/orange change charts mark lower vs higher in the second selection.

Yes. Use Download chart for a PNG of the current chart (with its title, the applied force/month filters, and a CrimeMapsUK watermark), and open View data table under a chart for the exact figures. On Trends you can also download the page’s underlying series as CSV. District and force area pages, and sector pages with enough records to be indexed, offer their own monthly and category figures as a CSV, one area per file, beside a citation you can copy.

Yes. Our API gives district figures as JSON without a key, within free limits, and its OpenAPI contract describes every field. AI assistants can use the same figures as tools through our MCP server. Each answer carries a link to the area's page and a citation. Please show the attribution and link the page when you use the figures.

Forces publish monthly releases on data.police.uk. CrimeMapsUK ingests those releases and rebuilds maps and summaries after each import. Current coverage dates are on the about page.

Use the help and feedback form. Your message is emailed to the CrimeMapsUK inbox; include a page URL and enough detail for us to investigate. This is a small project, so replies may take a few days.

Start with the articles, especially How to use the dashboards and How to interpret the hex maps. Processing choices and limits are on the methodology page.