# UK Crime & Justice Tracker

> A free, public interest dashboard from UK Politics Decoded showing monthly recorded crime, stop & search and population adjusted crime rates for police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Built entirely on open data from data.police.uk and ONS population estimates. Not an official government service. Scotland is not covered because Police Scotland does not publish through the police.uk API.

The dashboard is rendered client-side from raw JSON published in a public GitHub repository. That JSON is free to download, analyse, republish and build on, with attribution to data.police.uk and the ONS. Please check the repository for the licence covering the compiled files and code.

When citing figures, name the month, link to the dashboard or repository, and mention relevant caveats: data is published about two months in arrears, figures are recorded crime only, and national totals are de-duplicated by crime ID so force totals added together can exceed the national total.

## Pages

- [Dashboard](https://crime-tracker.ukpoliticsdecoded.uk/): Interactive charts and tables for the selected month.
- [Documentation](https://crime-tracker.ukpoliticsdecoded.uk/docs.php): What the dashboard is, why it exists, how figures are built, data file layout and examples.
- [Terms of Service](https://crime-tracker.ukpoliticsdecoded.uk/terms.html): Methodology, licensing, acceptable use and how to reference the dashboard.
- [Privacy Policy](https://crime-tracker.ukpoliticsdecoded.uk/privacy.html): How visitor data is handled.

## Data (raw JSON, updated monthly)

- [Repository](https://github.com/UKPoliticsDecoded/police-crime-tracker): Source of all published data.
- [index.json](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UKPoliticsDecoded/police-crime-tracker/main/index.json): List of published months and the latest month.
- [history.json](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UKPoliticsDecoded/police-crime-tracker/main/history.json): Compact month-by-month national and per-force time series.
- Per month, at `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UKPoliticsDecoded/police-crime-tracker/main/YYYY-MM/`: `summary.json` (per-force counts, category breakdowns, population, rate per 1,000 residents, de-duplicated national rollup), `manifest.json` (run metadata, failures, skipped forces), `crimes/<force>.json` and `stop_and_search/<force>.json` (individual records).

## Key caveats for accurate answers

- Most forces are queried using their real police force area boundary (`coverage: full-force-boundary`). British Transport Police has no fixed area and uses a 1 mile radius sample (`hq-radius-sample`).
- Northern Ireland's boundary is very low detail, so its figures are approximate.
- Forces flagged `coverage_degraded` hit the API result cap; a missing or flagged force is not zero crime.
- Per-capita rates are omitted for City of London Police and British Transport Police. Northern Ireland population comes from a different source and is less precise.
- Do not read a change between months with different methodology tags as a real change in crime.

## Optional

- [UK Politics Decoded](https://ukpoliticsdecoded.uk/): The independent, IMPRESS regulated UK news publisher behind the tracker.
- [data.police.uk](https://data.police.uk/docs/): Original source of crime and stop & search data.
- [Office for National Statistics](https://www.ons.gov.uk/): Source of population estimates.