Locatio shows you a rate for every area, the spread from street to street, and a limit you set yourself.
For each neighbourhood, we show you a crime band, derived from crimes recorded by the police over the last 12 months per 1,000 residents.
Our bands are specific to their city, with each band containing one third of the neighbourhoods, so it is a city measure, not a national one.
An area's rate can hide a lot, so Locatio shows the range most of its streets fall in — and more: at street level you can overlay the map with recorded crime to see where it concentrates.
You choose the level that you are comfortable with and the map adjusts accordingly. Any areas past your chosen limit fade out on the map rather than disappear fully — so you can still see what’s been excluded.
"Typical street" means the middle one of the area's own postcodes, counted within 200 metres and compared with every street in the city.
We’ve used real Locatio data for the Stoke Newington and Chislehurst areas in London as our examples here.
The gradient is every street in London, from less recorded crime on the left to more on the right — the same scale the limit above runs on. The bar beneath shows where most of that area’s streets fall on it, with a mark on its typical street.
Stoke Newington’s typical street records about 200 a year, almost exactly London’s own middle of 205. Chislehurst’s records about 23.
Nearly everyone we speak with about Locatio cites crime as one of, if not the biggest concern about moving to a new area — in fact in one case, the fear of making a mistake stopped a mover in their tracks.
So Locatio treats this data sensibly and sensitively, and we have been mindful of any ‘over claim’. But this is nuanced, and we want to share so that you can use this feature effectively.
This might sound like we’re stating the obvious, but the data counts ‘recorded’ crime. Of course, there will also be crime that is un-recorded, and this data can’t show us how much.
When a crime is recorded it’s assigned to one of fourteen categories: anti-social behaviour, bicycle theft, burglary, criminal damage and arson, drugs, other crime, other theft, possession of weapons, public order, robbery, shoplifting, theft from the person, vehicle crime, and violence and sexual offences.
Every recorded crime is pinned to a point on the map — never to the address where it happened. The police snap each one to a pre-set point that covers at least eight addresses nearby, so a crime can never be traced back to a door. The pinned-points are published, and we count those within 200 metres of each postcode.
We purposefully excluded the shoplifting category as this is crime against a ‘business’ rather than an individual.
The more people in an area, the naturally higher the recorded crime. So the rate is divided by the people who live there (we use the 2021 Census for that). But popular tourist areas, with significantly more people than actually live there, will likely read as high.