About data.police.uk
Contents
- ASB Incidents, Crime and Outcomes
- General Information
- Data Download
- Data Provenance
- Privacy and Anonymisation
- Data Quality
- Data Verification
- Stop and Search
- Tools and Libraries
- Contact Details
ASB Incidents, Crime and Outcomes
General Information
- Title: ASB Incidents, Crime and Outcomes
- Theme: Crime and Criminal Justice
- Description: Individual crime and anti-social behaviour (ASB) incidents, including street-level location information and subsequent police and court outcomes associated with the crime.
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Keywords: police, courts, crime, anti-social behaviour
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Frequency: Monthly
- Time Period Covered: October 2021 to September 2024
- Geographic Coverage: England, Wales, Northern Ireland
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Publisher: Single Online Home National Digital Team
- licence: Open Government Licence v3.0
- Language: en-GB
Data Download
The latest complete copy of all the data described on this page can be downloaded in CSV format from the archive page of this site or from data.police.uk/data/archive/latest.zip.
URLs are structured consistently in the following format so you can download newer versions programmatically each month.
https://data.police.uk/data/archive/[year]-[month].zip
Because the data file is so large, we also provide Custom CSV Download and JSON API helper interfaces so you can easily access subsets of the data. Generally, we recommend working with one of these interfaces instead of the full data dump.
CSV Columns
The columns in the CSV files are as follows:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Reported by | The force that provided the data about the crime. |
| Falls within | At present, also the force that provided the data about the crime. This is currently being looked into and is likely to change in the near future. |
| Longitude and Latitude | The anonymised coordinates of the crime. See Location Anonymisation for more information. |
| LSOA code and LSOA name | References to the Lower Layer Super Output Area that the anonymised point falls into, according to the LSOA boundaries provided by the Office for National Statistics. |
| Crime type | One of the crime types listed in the Police.UK FAQ. |
| Last outcome category | A reference to whichever of the outcomes associated with the crime occurred most recently. For example, this crime's 'Last outcome category' would be 'Formal action is not in the public interest'. |
| Context | A field provided for forces to provide additional human-readable data about individual crimes. Currently, for newly added CSVs, this is always empty. |
Data Provenance
The data on this site is published by the Single Online Home National Digital Team, and is provided to us by the 43 geographic police forces in England and Wales, the British Transport Police, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Ministry of Justice.
Data Flow
Every month each police force generates a Crime and ASB file and a Police Outcomes file in a set format. The forces upload these to a private server managed by the Single Online Home National Digital Team in the Government network, where the files undergo quality assurance.
Copies of the data from police forces is then sent to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), where they try to match the crimes with any court results contained in their own records. The MoJ send any matching court results back to the Single Online Home National Digital Team, where they are integrated with the existing data.
All data is then anonymised before being published to this site.
Police Force Systems and Data Extraction
To fully understand the provenance of the data, it's helpful to explain the source IT systems typically used by police forces, and how they relate to the data we publish here.
| System | Description | Typical Data Inputters | Provides Data For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Incident Management/Command and Control | Used for recording of all incidents handled by the force, including road traffic collisions, ASB and crime reports, and public enquiries. | Call-handling and Dispatch staff. | Crime and ASB file, Court Result matching |
| Crime Management | If an incident is confirmed as a crime, a record is created on the Crime Management system. This is then used to maintain a record of the subsequent investigation. | Crime Recording Bureau staff and investigating Officers. | Crime and ASB file, Police Outcomes file, Court Result matching |
| Custody | Used to record the details of any arrests in relation to a crime. | Custody staff and investigation Officers. | Police Outcomes file, Court Result matching |
| Case Management | If someone is charged for a crime, a case file is prepared ready for the court hearing. This system helps track the preparation of the case and, in some forces, the court result. | Criminal Justice Unit staff. | Court Result matching |
In some police forces these four systems integrate tightly with each other. In other forces they operate as distinct, siloed systems, with limited or no connectivity between them.
When the systems are siloed, there is typically more work required for forces to produce the data and a higher risk of quality issues due to manual double-keying on the source systems.
Because of the differences in IT systems throughout the police forces, the exact process for creating the two files varies. Generally speaking though, a force statistician will either:
- Run queries against the source systems to extract the relevant data, and manipulate the results (usually in Excel) to join the data and get it into the correct format.
- Run queries against a data warehouse or analytics system overarching the source systems. This is also usually manipulated to get it into the required format.
Crime and ASB File
This file contains a record of all the Crime and ASB incidents in the previous month. The data typically comes from a mixture of Crime Management systems and Command and Control systems.
The file that forces upload contains the following fields:
- Offence Reference (for crimes only — left blank for ASB incidents)
- Date
- Home Office Offence Code
- Easting (OSGB36 for England and Wales, OSNI52 for Northern Ireland)
- Northing (OSGB36 for England and Wales, OSNI52 for Northern Ireland)
- Context
It also contains a variety of other reference numbers, which are used as part of the internal Court Result Matching process, but which are not published.
The data then undergoes quality assurance and anonymisation.
Police Outcomes File
This file contains status updates for crimes where the status update happened in the previous month. It's common for this file to contain updates for crimes that originally occurred many months in the past.
It contains the following fields:
- Offence Reference
- Outcome Date
- Outcome Category
It also contains a variety of other reference numbers, which are used as part of the internal Court Result Matching process, but which are not published.
After upload, the outcomes are joined up with the original crime based on the Offence Reference field.
The data then undergoes quality assurance and anonymisation.
Court Result Matching
A copy of all the data relating to crimes where someone has been charged and sent to court is then transferred securely to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).
The MoJ try to match the crime details against all their court result records to find any relevant court outcomes. The matching process is described in the Understanding the Justice Outcome Data on the police.uk website PDF document provided by the MoJ. Match rates are available to download.
Privacy and Anonymisation
Trying to find a balance between providing granular crime data and protecting the privacy of victims has been one of the biggest challenges involved in releasing this data.
There was consultation between the Information Commissioner's Office and Data Protection specialists in the Home Office in the run up to releasing this data, working within their guidance to create an anonymisation process which adequately minimises privacy risks whilst still meeting our transparency goals and being useful to the public.
Crime and ASB Anonymisation
The data in the Crime and ASB file uploaded by forces each month contains sensitive personal data and has to be anonymised before publication. The table below summarises the anonymisation process.
| Field | Raw Example | Anonymisation Method | Anonymised Example | Published in CSVs | Published in API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offence Reference | C2/0123/13 | Replaced with a one-way hash of the record. | 7512cb691a6f9c6c47a2cdfdcd0a1f8735a0870d3a2bde21d8311bd74f17eeeb | Crime ID | persistent_id |
| Date | 2013-07-23 | Truncated to show the year and month only. | 2013-07 | Month | date |
| Home Office Offence Code | 104/25 | Assigned into one of 14 categories. A complete mapping between Home Office Offence Codes and Categories can be downloaded here | Violence and Sexual Offences | Crime Type | category |
| Easting | 519500 | Anonymised in line with the location anonymisation process. Converted to WGS84 latitude. | 52.58019 | Latitude | latitude |
| Northing | 299500 | Anonymised in line with the location anonymisation process. Converted to WGS84 longitude. | -0.23782 | Longitude | longitude |
| Context | This was part of the recent public disorder events in the town centre. | None | This was part of the recent public disorder events in the town centre. | Context |
Police Outcome Anonymisation
The data in the Police Outcomes file uploaded by forces each month undergoes a small amount of anonymisation before publication.
| Field | Raw Example | Anonymisation Method | Anonymised Example | Published in CSVs | Published in API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offence Reference | C2/0123/13 | Not published | Not published | ||
| Date | 2013-07-23 | Truncated to show the year and month only. | 2013-07 | Month | date |
| Category | Caution | None | Caution | Outcome type | category |
Location Anonymisation
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.
How are crime locations anonymised?
We maintain a master list of anonymous map points. Each map point is specifically chosen so that it:
- Appears over the centre point of a street, above a public place such as a Park or Airport, or above a commercial premise like a Shopping Centre or Nightclub.
- Has a catchment area which contains at least eight postal addresses or no postal addresses at all.
When crime data is uploaded by police forces, the exact location of each crime is compared against this master list to find the nearest map point. The co-ordinates of the actual crime are then replaced with the co-ordinates of the map point. If the nearest map point is more than 20km away, the co-ordinates are zeroed out. No other filtering or rules are applied.
How was the master list of snap points created?
The snap points list was created in 2012 and based on Ordnance Survey population and housing developments relevant to that year. The snap points list was refreshed in 2022 using more recent data from the same sources.
In summary, to create the master list of anonymous points, we:
- Took the centre point of every road in England and Wales from the Ordnance Survey Locator dataset.
- Augmented these with locally relevant points of interest from the Point X dataset.
- Subsequently analysed each map point to see how many postal addresses were contained in its catchment area according to the Ordnance Survey Address-Point dataset. Any with between 1 and 7 postal addresses were discarded to protect privacy.
- The remaining points were provided to police forces for a human assessment. A small number of additions and deletions were made based on their feedback to make the map points more locally relevant.
| Type of map point | Count | Count (before privacy filtering) |
|---|---|---|
| Street | 679089 | 833913 |
| Sports/Recreation Area | 24510 | 34237 |
| Parking Area | 17797 | 29591 |
| Park/Open Space | 14051 | 20418 |
| Supermarket | 5703 | 7518 |
| Petrol Station | 5501 | 7296 |
| Pedestrian Subway | 4570 | 6173 |
| Shopping Area | 3024 | 4232 |
| Further/Higher Educational Building | 1347 | 2095 |
| Police Station | 1083 | 1605 |
| Hospital | 982 | 1721 |
| Nightclub | 824 | 1109 |
| Bus/Coach Station | 816 | 1141 |
| Theatre/Concert Hall | 733 | 997 |
| Conference/Exhibition Centre | 524 | 781 |
| Airport/Airfield | 369 | 564 |
| Added by Police Force | 350 | 577 |
| Ferry Terminal | 203 | 320 |
| Theme/Adventure Park | 106 | 370 |
| Prison | 102 | 171 |
| Race Track | 100 | 170 |
| Motorway Service Area | 79 | 147 |
Data Quality
Quality Assurance
The data that police forces provide to the Single Online Home National Digital Team and Ministry of Justice goes through a rigorous quality control process, involving format validation, automated testing, and manual verification and approval.
Format Validation
At the point of upload the following checks are carried out on the Crime & ASB and Police Outcomes files. The upload is rejected if any of the checks fail.
- All fields are in the correct format (includes length validation and checks against regular expressions).
- All dates are valid and fall within the correct time periods.
- No required fields are blank.
- All locations are within England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Manual Verification
After the upload has been completed, a summary of the data and potential issues are provided to the force. The force must review the data and approve it as suitable for publication.
This manual check includes assessing:
- The percentage changes since last month, overall and for each individual category of crime.
- The number of crimes that have been uploaded with no location.
- The number of crimes that have not been successfully anonymised to a map point.
- The number of crimes that have been anonymised to a map point outside of the originating police force boundary.
- All free-text context content for potential privacy breaches.
- The overall number of outcomes compared to the number of crimes.
- The percentage split across the outcome categories, and comparison to previous months.
- The number of outcomes that were uploaded that couldn't be joined up to an original crime record.
Automated Testing
If any anomalies are spotted, these are flagged to the Single Online Home National Digital Team to investigate.
The automated tests run include such checks as:
- All CSVs have more than one line.
- All CSVs are unique.
- With four specific exceptions, no one region's crime count doubles or halves from one month to the next.
- All force boundaries contain points falling within one degree of the other points in that boundary.
- All force boundary points fall between within the rectangle with edges at 8.2°W, 1.8°E, 49.8°N and 55.9°N.
Known Issues
There are some major, difficult to fix, issues with the data published on this site.
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Location accuracy. Inconsistent geocoding policies in police forces mean we cannot be confident that the location data provided is fully accurate or consistent. This is especially true of crimes where the exact location is not known, which could be because it happened somewhere not included in the force gazetteer system or because the victim is not sure where it happened. Differences in the quality of gazetteer systems is also a big factor. Estimates of geocoding accuracy in different forces range from 60% to 97%.
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Court Result matching. There is no unique identifier for crimes that runs from the police service to the CPS and onwards to the Courts. This makes trying to track a crime through the whole Criminal Justice Service automatically almost impossible. We use a 'fuzzy matching' process to try and achieve this, with success rates between 19% and 97% depending on where in the country the crime happened.
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Double counting of ASB and Crime. We suspect that there may be six police forces who are duplicating certain types of ASB incidents in their uploads. We are working with them to resolve this and will make sure that any incorrect data is fixed.
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Constantly changing data. The data that forces upload to this site is a snapshot in time at the end of a particular month. For the crimes that are uploaded, some may be reclassified as a different type of crime in future months, or confirmed as a false report after investigation. Similarly, a crime may have its location changed in the source IT system as more information becomes available. In most cases, we would never find out about these later changes unless the force decides to do a complete data refresh. This is fairly rare.
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Missing outcome data. Neither the British Transport Police nor the Police Service of Northern Ireland provide outcome data. Although we are exploring the possibility of this with both forces, technical challenges mean that a solution remains some way off.
Sometimes there are other specific known issues that arise. For example, a force might be in the middle of upgrading their Incident Management system, making them unable to extract and provide ASB data for the latest month. In most cases, these known issues are temporary and fixed in the following month's publication. Any current known issues will be documented on the changelog.
Reporting Issues
If you find any issues or anomalies with the data, please report it to us via our contact form, selecting 'A problem with the data' as the subject.
Fixing Issues
When a problem with the data has made it into production, we ask the relevant force to fix it by re-uploading and overwriting the erroneous data.
Most of the time these fixes are made in the next monthly data publication. If the force doesn't have the relevant people available to fix it or the root cause of the problem lies in the source IT system, it may take longer to rectify.
You can view all data changes and fixes on the changelog.
Data Verification
All the zip files published on the archive page have a 32-character MD5 hash displayed next to them (for example: a0f2a3c1dcd5b1cac71bf0c03f2ff1bd).
You can verify that the zip file has downloaded correctly by calculating the MD5 hash of your downloaded file and comparing it to the one shown on the site.
On macOS, Linux and other Unix-based systems you can use md5sum from your terminal.
On Windows, you can use the built-in File Checksum Integrity Verifier from your command line or a third-party tool such as the md5summer software.
The Single Online Home National Digital Team does not provide support for these utilities. You use these utilities at your own risk.
Stop and Search
- Title: Stop and Search
- Theme: Crime and Criminal Justice
- Description: Individual stop and search records, including date and time, street-level location, ethnicity, gender and age of the person stopped, and outcome
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Keywords: police, ethnicity, stop and search
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Frequency: Monthly
- Time Period Covered: December 2014 to September 2024
- Geographic Coverage: A subset of police forces in England and Wales
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Publisher: Single Online Home National Digital Team
licence: Open Government Licence v3.0
- Language: en-GB
Tools and Libraries
You may find the following software and libraries useful when working with the data made available on this site. All are available at no cost and are open-source.
The Single Online Home National Digital Team does not assess or provide support for these utilities and a link to them is not an endorsement. You use these utilities at your own risk.
Working with the API
| Language | Tool |
|---|---|
| .NET | PoliceUK.NET |
| cURL | cURL |
| Node.js | ukpd |
| PHP | PHP Curl library |
| Python | Police API Client |
| R | ukpolice |
| Ruby | OldBill |
| Go | ukpolice |
Working with the CSV files
- LibreOffice Calc
Working with the KML files
Contact Details
If you have and questions about the data, suggestions for improvements, concerns about the disclosure or personal details, or have noticed any errors in the data, please get in touch with us via the contact form.