That’s a good question!

Being the type of person that likes to work with data and review analytics, and having a need to find out once I had posed myself the question, I thought today may be a great day to shake that tree and see what the data looked like on a map.

Firstly, I would like to point out that all the data on the maps below is freely available from Police UK and I am using it under an open data licence, as it is all government data.

The purpose of this blog is to show and analyse two different data sets. The data is based on all crime incidents available that have been recorded in April 2019 and April 2020.

Each of the maps below show live data and can be manipulated. We have included quick filtering top right that enables police force filtering, with a second filter based on “type of crime”.

April 2019 Map – All forces and available crime types reported

With the data used, in April 2019 there was a total of 556,320 incidents of crime recorded in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and with the British Transport Police.

By more of a logical assumption I would have concluded that April 2020 would have been significantly lower due to us all being at home in lockdown.

April 2020 Map – All forces and available crime types reported

As a comparison you may also have assumed that due to lock down there would be significantly less incidents reported, but as you can see in the data provided there was 530,196 incidents recorded in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Sure, data is subjective. As the maps above are live you can filter and review the charts on the right-hand side which show a percentage by type and by police force as you move around the map.

This is just one great example of using data spatially, and regardless of your business type whether it be customer, finance, or education, if you have data sets then they can be mapped in the same way.

If you would like to find out more about what we can do with Mapsimise and how we can help you achieve data outcomes, there are some useful links below.

Data of all types can be used to give a better understanding of a given location, and although representing crime data in this way is probably going to be useful for the related police forces, the data can be easily visualised and reported on. Building trends and charts over time gives real insight to activity by location and there are many other business types that might find this useful.

Let us consider planning and construction. Being able to understand crime incident data by an area may give consideration to projects and value of house building along with planning granted.  Such statistics maybe useful to consider the right level of security for a given sight or development.

If your business focuses on security and security implementation, then crime incident data may help with the evaluation of what equipment your customers might need now and in the future.

But we must emphasise that Mapsimise does not need to be all about crime incident data, this blog just gives this example of how it might be used effectively.

If you would like to discuss, then there is a link to my diary below. I look forward to helping you see your data in a totally transformational way!