The evolution of crime categories since December 2010

When Police.uk started back in January 2011,  the UK had precisely the following number of criminal offences and ASB – 1,470 – which were categorised in the following way on www.police.uk ;

Burglary – 9

Robbery – 4

Violent – 144

Vehicle – 5

Other – 1293

ASB – 15

So out of a maximum potential of 1,470, breaking it down into 6 categories was not actually a very big step towards granularity even when the need for anonymisation was taken into account. Clearly,  the “Other” category clearly did not tell you very much at all and contained a significant number of crimes that required no categorical or geospatial anonymity at all like bicycle theft. Crime data should be understood to exist in 3 subsets – about the crime, the offender and the victim. What we have here on www.ukcrimestats.com is limited information about the crime.

(The United States incidentally has over 5,000 types of criminal offences and arguably have long lost count).

So I thought it would be helpful to paste up a couple of images of the evolution of crime categories that we use which are passed down to us by our rival, the tax-funded monopoly (because it unquestionably has first use and discriminatory access to the data), www.police.uk .

Evolution of Crime Categories

Anyway, as we then anticipated, there have been a number of new categories created as illustrated above in response to public and commercial interest.

In more detail, here they are.

Anti-Social Behaviour (from Dec 10)

Robbery (from Dec 10)

Burglary (from Dec 10)

Vehicle (from Dec 10)

Violent and Sexual Offences (from Dec 10)

Other Crime (From Dec 10)

Theft – Shoplifting (from Sept 11)

Drugs (from Sept 11)

Criminal Damage and Arson (from Sept 11)

Public Disorder and Weapons (from Sept 11   to May 2013)

Theft – Other (from Dec 10)

Bike Theft (from May 13)

Theft From the Person (from May 13)

Possession of Weapons (from May 13)

Public Order (from May 13)

Source; http://ukcrimestats.com