About

This repository is a little manual on how to access London Police Data in a more user-friendly way than downloading separate CSV files. Note that this offers data only for London even though the portal offers data for the whole country.

The dataset

The dataset contains the following information for each crime that happened in London:

1. Month and year
2. Latitude, Longitude
3. Short description
4. Crime type

Crime types mapping

The mapping below is important when passing arguments to the scripts in this package. The CSV downloaded from the police website uses the names as in the second column of the below table. When using these scripts, whenever a crime type is required please use the first column of the table.

Internal name	Official data.police.uk name
theft-from-person	Theft from the person
vehicle-crime	Vehicle crime
shoplifting	Shoplifting
violence-sexual-offences	Violence and sexual offences
anti-social-behaviour	Anti-social behaviour
burglary	Burglary
robbery	Robbery
criminal-damage-arson	Criminal damage and arson
other-theft	Other theft
possession-weapons	Possession of weapons
other-crime	Other crime
public-order	Public order
drugs	Drugs
bicycle-theft	Bicycle theft
violent-crime	Violent crime
public-disorder-weapons	Public disorder and weapons

Steps to retrieve the data

1. Download the dataset from Kaggle as crime.db file.
2. Either use SQLite directly by loading crime.db that you downloaded in step 1, or use the provided python scripts to generate CSV files for a specific time interval and for specific crime types.

Examples of usage

Generate a CSV file for specific crime types for a specific range

python3 -m crimeretriever.command getcsv --dbfile ./crime.db --startdate 2015-01-01 --enddate 2015-01-31 --crimetypes burglary theft-from-person --outfile 'export.csv'

The columns in the generated CSV are:

INDEX, MONTH, LATITUDE, LONGITUDE, DESCRIPTION, CRIME_TYPE

Warnings

Please, regularly check the Changelog for any issues with the data.

Currently, for London data, the following issues are not yet resolved:

1. City of London data for the period starting on Sep 2017 until present are not yet available due to change of IT infrastructure at the CoL police.

Advanced Usage

Regenerate the database from CSV files

python3 -m crimeretriever.command builddb --dbfile new-db-name.db --rootpath ./path-to-folder-with-uk-police-csvs

Licence

The data are originally licensed by Open Government Licence v3.0. This manual, and the accompanying source code is licensed under MIT License - see LICENCE.md

Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2012

Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2012