Microproduct data guidebeginner

UK Police Street-Level Crime

Monthly street-level crime and outcome records for building neighbourhood safety monitors in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Medium · ≤2 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
data.police.uk
Updates
Monthly
Data terms
Open Government Licence v3.0

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

The Police API returns street-level crimes for a point or custom area. Start with one coordinate pair and the most recently published month. Locations are snapped to anonymised map points, reporting coverage varies by force, and counts are not official statistics.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Read the data.police.uk about page and the Open Government Licence notice.
  2. 2.Request street-level crimes for one latitude and longitude.
  3. 3.Keep category, month, and the anonymised street name.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://data.police.uk/api/crimes-street/all-crime",
    params={"lat": 51.5074, "lng": -0.1278},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
crimes = pd.json_normalize(response.json())
print(crimes[["id", "category", "month", "location.street.name"]].head(20))
print(crimes["category"].value_counts().head())
4

Test a useful signal

Summarise recent street crime around one point

Test whether category counts can power a neighbourhood safety snapshot.

  1. 01Keep crime id, category, month, and anonymised street name.
  2. 02Count records by category and flag missing coordinates.
  3. 03Explain that points are snapped for privacy and that force coverage and lag limit comparison across areas.

Dataset details

data.police.uk is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: 2014-present street-level records.

Theme

Government & Policy

Domains

Public SafetyCrimeLocal Government

Data types

Event DataGeospatial

Tasks

Geographic AnalysisTrend AnalysisNeighbourhood Monitoring

Geography

United Kingdom

Formats

JSONCSV

Provider

data.police.uk

Data terms

Open Government Licence v3.0