How to check crime in an area before buying a house

How to check an area

1. Search the postcode on police.uk and open the crime map for that neighbourhood.
2. Look at several months. One month can be unusual, and a pattern over a year tells you more.
3. Read the categories, not just the total. Records are grouped into 14 broad types, including burglary, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour.
4. Compare the area with somewhere you know well, using the same method.
5. If you want the raw records, use data.police.uk. In November 2026 its crime data ran from September 2023 to August 2026, which shows the usual delay.

How police.uk anonymises the data

The published locations are not the real ones, and that is deliberate. Before release, the coordinates of each crime are replaced with those of a nearby anonymous map point, often called a snap point, taken from a master list.

• Each map point sits over a street centre, a public place or commercial premises.
• A point's catchment must contain at least eight postal addresses, or none. Points with one to seven addresses were removed for privacy.
• If the nearest point is more than 20km away, the crime is left off the map.
• The date is cut to a month and year, and the offence reference is replaced with a one-way hash.

So a dot on a street is a collecting point. It can stand for incidents at several nearby places, and a street can look busy simply because a map point sits there. A dot outside a house says nothing about that house.

What the data cannot tell you

• What happened at an address. Exact locations are removed on purpose.
• A crime rate. These are counts, not adjusted for how many people live in or pass through an area. A town centre or station will collect records from visitors. Any postcode checker offering a rate should say what it divided by.
• Everything that happened. The ONS says police recorded crime does not capture all crimes, because some are never reported or recorded.
• How serious an incident was. The categories are broad, and violent crime can run from common assault to murder.
• A precise picture. Data.police.uk estimates location accuracy at 60% to 97%, depending on the force. Each month is a snapshot, so later corrections may not appear.
• Your own experience. Figures cannot say how a street feels at night.

Gaps from police forces

Some forces do not supply every month. When we checked in November 2026, the data.police.uk changelog said no Greater Manchester Police crime data was available while the force moved to a new IT system. It also listed missing months in 2026 for British Transport Police, Gloucestershire, Gwent, North Yorkshire and Sussex.

An empty map or a sudden drop may therefore be a data gap. Check the changelog before reading anything into it, particularly near a force boundary.

Reading the numbers sensibly

Look for what persists. Repeated burglary or vehicle crime over many months is more useful to a home buyer than a single high total. Remember that an area near shops, nightlife or a station will count differently from a quiet residential street nearby.

In England, the Indices of Deprivation 2025 include a crime domain for small areas, which gives a relative measure from a different angle. Then go and look. Visit in the evening and at the weekend, and talk to people who live there. How to check an area before buying covers the wider checks.

No dataset can label a place safe or unsafe, and this one does not try to. Use it to form questions.

What a Doorstep Report shows

A Doorstep Report shows neighbourhood figures from police.uk for the latest published month: records within about a mile of the postcode centre, by category, including anti-social behaviour. They are not incidents at the address and not a safety rating. An empty result does not establish that no crime occurred.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Police Scotland is not among the forces listed as supplying data.police.uk, so there is no equivalent street-level map. The Scottish Government publishes annual recorded crime figures by council area. The Police Service of Northern Ireland does supply data. Doorstep Reports cover England and Wales only.