About CrimeTrends
CrimeTrends is an independent UK crime intelligence platform that transforms raw Home Office data into clear, searchable, neighbourhood-level safety profiles — free and open to everyone.
43
Police Forces
2.1M
Postcodes Covered
331
Local Authorities
Monthly
Data Updates
Our Mission
The Home Office publishes monthly crime data from every police force in England and Wales under the Open Government Licence. That data is authoritative but hard to use: 43 separate CSV feeds, no normalisation for population size, no historical comparison, and no location context beyond a rough street reference.
CrimeTrends solves this. Our pipeline ingests that data monthly, normalises it by ONS Census 2021 population estimates, joins it to geographic boundaries, and serves it as a coherent intelligence platform — from national rankings down to individual postcodes. The result is the same verified data, presented in a way that any person can actually use to answer the question: "Is this area safe?"
How We Work
1. Ingest
We download all published crime CSVs from data.police.uk on a monthly cadence — 43 forces, typically 5–8 million records per month.
2. Normalise
Raw counts are divided by ONS 2021 resident population estimates and annualised to produce comparable crime rates per 1,000 residents.
3. Contextualise
Crime records are joined to ONS boundary geographies (LSOA → ward → LTLA → county) and enriched with Census demographics and property data.
4. Publish
Processed data is served as ranked intelligence pages for every city, ward and outcode, with national and county-level comparisons.
Our Data Sources
Police.uk Open Data
Open Government Licence v3.0
Street-level crime and outcomes published monthly by 43 police forces in England and Wales. Covers approximately 5–8 million incident records per month dating back to 2010.
data.police.uk open_in_newONS Census 2021
Open Government Licence v3.0
Population, demographics, household tenure, ethnicity and socioeconomic data at Output Area (OA) granularity. Used as the denominator for all per-resident rate calculations.
ons.gov.uk open_in_newHM Land Registry
Open Government Licence v3.0
Property transaction data including sale prices, property type and transaction dates. Used to provide housing market context on postcode and ward-level pages.
gov.uk/land-registry open_in_newAll datasets are used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed from relevant government agencies.
Data Integrity Commitments
100% Open Government Data
All crime statistics originate from police.uk and ONS, licensed under OGL v3.0. No proprietary or purchased data is blended into the crime rate calculations.
Algorithmic, not editorial
Crime rates and rankings are computed programmatically. No manual adjustments are made to any area's data. The pipeline is deterministic given the same inputs.
No paid placement or removal
CrimeTrends does not accept payment to modify, suppress, or remove crime data for any area. Rankings reflect only the underlying data.
Transparent limitations
We publish a full account of data limitations — what the statistics do not capture, known caveats, and reporting lags. See our Editorial Standards.
Get In Touch
For data correction requests, press enquiries, research collaboration, or API access, contact the CrimeTrends team directly.
Data: Police.uk (OGL v3.0) · Population: ONS Census 2021 · Property: HM Land Registry (OGL v3.0) · Methodology · Editorial Standards