All done. Kent Police however is still far behind on catching up with missing data. Officially, the changelog says that they are only missing ASB data from November 2018 due to a change in IT systems.
But it seems to go much deeper than that. In a typical month, Kent
would report 20k crime and ASB incidents but the data from November to
February is only showing 3k and 6k crimes which can’t be explained by a
missing 2-3k ASB incidents. I shall take it up with them directly.

The leading crime and postcode data research and analysis platform

I’ve looked at this using postcode sectors – a small unit and probably the most relevant. This is something you can easily query with a ukcrimestats login. Here are the top 10 – I knew Cambridge was bad, but not that bad !

A good piece in the BBC here recently – Crime figures: Do the police know how much there really is?

I’m always at pains to stress the limitations of crime data when people phone/email me – as they frequently do. I even republished a chapter by Nick Ross, formerly of Crimewatch from his excellent book, Crime: How to solve it – and why so much of we’re told is wrong. By it’s nature crime is secretive and there will always be a gap between actual crime, reported crime and recorded crime.

I have long argued that it is wrong for the Police Forces to be in charge of the collection and collation of crime data and statistics because that is how they are held to account and there is a clear conflict of interest.

A bit like students marking their own exam papers.

There has to be a better way.

For all that, crime data in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – is for researchers, the number one crime dataset in the world. Monthly data from 2011, divided into crime types and fairly closely geospatially located. I would never argue that it’s perfect, but I’m confident that it is the most transparent crime dataset in the world – both in scale and detail.

And something, in this case, a substantial something, is far better than nothing.

The answer according to the Land Registry data, which you can query with our website here – is the Anchor Hanover Group who have taken ownership fo 1870 properties between December 2018 and February 2019 alone. AHG have a line in retirement homes according to their website.

After AHG, it’s Torus62 (me neither, but they are big) with 1673. Read more about them here.

About once a week, somebody emails me wanting to place an infographic on our website about crime statistics and security solutions to drive traffic to their webiste and push their product at no cost to themselves. Nothing commercially wrong with that. And I would go further, crime preventative measures should in general be much more part of the conversation rather than crime solving. However, we don’t accept inforgraphics because invariably they are not using our data – which we can verify – and basically they want free advertising.

Moreover, often enough, it’s not even relevant – like an infographic on crime data in the USA !

We also have a big responsibility here. Our primary mission is to make clear what the crime data actually shows – warts and all. I will never sugarcoat the gaps and limitations in crime data. And running this website does cost money – developer time, servers, analytical time etc.

We are not paid for by government like www.police.uk (a monopoly a bit like the BBC but with a much larger market share – 95%) or given uncompetitive advantages – first use and discriminatory access to the data.

So we work very hard to differentiate ourselves and offer much more sophtisticated insights, including now on property price, Land Registry corporate ownership data and energy consumption. That’s why need your subscriptions, data purchases and bespoke requirements to keep us going. UKCrimestats.com evolved out of a think tank I launched a decade ago, with the principal aim of closing the gap between policy and knowledge. And with this website, we have come a long way in doing that and want to keep doing so.

If you are someone who wants to buy advertising space on our website, request bespoke data research on something else, please get in touch on crime@economicpolicycentre.com .