The crime rate in London was 106.4 crime offences per thousand people for the 2024/25 reporting year, compared with 105.8 in the previous year. Between 2015/16 and 2019/20, the crime rate in the UK capital increased in every reporting year. The sudden drop in 2019/20 was due to the COVID-19 pandemic causing a sharp reduction in certain types of crime, such as robbery and theft. Crime patterns in the capital Overall there were 951,803 crimes reported by the police in London in 2024/25, compared with 938,020 in the previous reporting year. Types of crime that have increased recently include violent crimes, shoplifting, and theft from the person offences. One positive is that the number of homicide offences in London has fallen to much lower levels than seen in the late 2010s. Additionally, the Metropolitan Police force area has a lower crime rate than many of the UK's other major police forces, such as West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, and South Yorkshire. Police recruitment drive ends era of cuts  The rise in crime in London happened alongside a decline in both personnel and funding for the London Metropolitan Police. Compared with 2010 for example, there were around 3,000 fewer police officers in 2018, while annual funding was reduced to around 3.3 billion pounds between 2013/14 and 2018/19, compared with 3.62 billion in 2012/13. These cuts were due to the policy of austerity that was implemented by the UK government during that time period, but this has recently been replaced by pledges to increase spending and to recruit more police. In 2024/25, the budget for the Metropolitan Police was over five billion pounds, while the number of officers in 2024 increased to around 35,310.

There were 951,803 crimes recorded in London in the 2024/25 reporting year, compared with 938,020 in the previous year. During this time period, crime in London increased steadily, with the figure of 912,487 in 2019/20 a pre-pandemic peak when there were approximately 102.4 crimes per 1,000 people taking place in the UK capital, compared with 106.4 crimes per 1,000 people in the most recent year. What types of crime are rising? Compared with crime levels before the COVID-19 pandemic, some types of crime have yet to reach the same levels they were at in the 2019/20 reporting year. The number of criminal offences related to theft and drugs, are slightly down in 2023/24 when compared with pre-pandemic trends. On the other hand, the number of violent crimes reached a peak of 252,545 offences in 2023/24, while the number of sexual offences in London since 2021/22 has been far higher than in previous years. London compared to the rest of UK While the UK capital receives extensive coverage for its crime problems, the increase in crime there is part of a wider trend afflicting the rest of the country. The overall crime rate for England and Wales in 2023/24 was 89.7 crimes per 1,000 people, slightly lower than in 2022/23, when the crime rate was the highest since 2006/07. Additionally the Metropolitan Police, the police service responsible for policing Greater London had the sixth-highest crime rate among police force areas with Cleveland police force in North East England having the highest.

London Street-Level Crime Data (2024)

This dataset provides street-level crime data reported by the Metropolitan Police Service and the City of London Police from January to December 2024, sourced from the UK Government's open data portal data.police.uk.

It includes detailed records of crimes by type, location, police force, and outcome category, covering the entire London region.

📁 Features (9 Columns)

• Crime ID: Unique identifier for the crime report
• Month: Reporting month in YYYY-MM format
• Reported by: Police force (Metropolitan / City of London)
• Crime type: Category of crime (e.g., drugs, burglary)
• Last outcome category: Case outcome (e.g., investigation complete)
• LSOA name: Lower Super Output Area (small local area)
• Location: Approximate street or landmark
• Latitude, Longitude: Coordinates for mapping

🧠 Suggested Use Cases

• Create interactive crime heatmaps of London
• Analyse trends in crime types over time
• Compare borough-level crime levels
• Build predictive models to forecast crime volume
• Cluster high-crime zones using spatial ML

📌 Source

Original source: https://data.police.uk/data/

📄 License

This dataset is shared under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Attribution: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Compiled and cleaned by @rahulladhani to support open ML exploration and public safety insights 🔍

Police recorded crime figures by Police Force Area and Community Safety Partnership areas (which equate in the majority of instances, to local authorities).

In 2023/24 the Metropolitan Police of London and the City of London police performed 139,482 stop and searches, a decrease when compared with the previous year. Before 2018/19, the use of this particular police power was declining, with stop and searches falling from 365,589 in 2012/13 to 135,850 in 2017/18.

There were ******* violent crime offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police Forces in London in 2024/25, a decrease when compared with the previous reporting year. From a low of ******* violent crimes in 2015/16, violent crime has increased almost every year. This reflects a pattern of increasing violent crime replicated across England and Wales as a whole, with a peak of *** million offences reported in 2022/23. Overall offences also rising The overall crime figures for London also show a trend of increasing crime in the UK capital. In 2015/16 for example, there were ******* crimes recorded in London, compared to ******* in 2024/25. This follows a similar pattern seen in England and Wales, which has witnessed an uptick in crime after reaching historic lows in the mid-2010s. In 2013/14 for example, there were approximately ** crimes per 100,000 people in England and Wales, compared with *****in 2024/25. By contrast, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland, crimes rates have remained broadly similar to the mid-2010s. Police budgets rising again Due to the austerity policies enacted by UK governments in the 2010s, the amount the UK government spent on the police was effectively frozen between 2013/14 and 2016/17. This policy has since been reversed, with the overall UK police budget reaching **** billion pounds in 2024/25, compared with 16.4 billion in 2016/17. The amount budgeted for the Metropolitan Police by the Mayor of London for 2025/26 was **** billion British pounds, a significant increase on the **** billion budgeted in 2018/19, but slightly lower than in 2024/25.

City Of London full crime rankings and individual crime statistics updated monthly. See how safe City Of London is as well as all recent crimes.

Recorded crime figures for CSP areas. Number of offences for the last two years, percentage change, and rates per 1,000 population for the latest year.

Number of crimes and crime rate by type of public transport, including bus, LU / DLR, London Overground, and London Tramlink. Monthly data released 3 months at a time at end of each quarter. The BTP is responsible for policing the rail network in London, including the TfL managed London Underground (LU), the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), London Tramlink and the London Overground (LO) services. Crime figures for the LU, DLR, London Tramlink and LO have been provided by the BTP. Crime figures for LU and DLR are reported together as these networks are policed by the same division of the BTP. The BTP only deals with crime relating to the rail and Tramlink network The MPS is responsible for policing the rest of London’s transport network, including the bus network. The figures reported for the bus network are based on official MPS figures for bus-related crime unless otherwise stated. There is no distinct category of ’bus crime’ in the MPS crime recording system. Recorded crime data is extracted from the MPS system using a complex query that searches all MPS crime for transport venue codes and those that have the word bus, bus stop, bus station and transport related words somewhere in the electronic case file. For this reason, some crimes that did not occur on the bus network will be included in the figures. This is different from the BTP as all crimes dealt with by the BTP and included on their crime recording system relate directly to the rail network. The crime volume and rate figures displayed by month are accurate according to the month they were extracted from police and TfL systems and are subject to revision due to late reporting of crimes and adjustment of crime and passenger figures. The full financial year total of figures will differ slightly as they will reflect the most accurate and up to date crime and passenger data available; hence the monthly figures here should not be used to generate full financial year totals. The adjusted financial year figures are published in the annual TfL Crime Statistics Bulletin available here. Data will be updated on a quarterly basis, showing monthly breakdowns of crime volume and rate of crime per million passenger journeys. The rate of crime per million passenger journeys is calculated by the dividing the volume of crimes by the number of passenger journeys multiplied by one million. A crime rate per million passenger journeys was unavailable for London Overground prior to April 2011 due to lack of accurate passenger journey information across the entire London Overground network. This dataset is included in the Greater London Authority's Night Time Observatory. Click here to find out more.

Crime incident counts and rates per million passenger journeys broken down by transport type.

This data is sourced from the TFL Open Datastore and reconstructed into a more user-friendly format.

metadata.csv contains all relevant information about how the data is sourced, collected, and distributed.

Notes:

*Underground rates and volume numbers include DLR (Docklands Light Railway) through March 2017.

The number of knife or sharp instrument offences recorded by the police in London rose to approximately 16,344 in 2024/25, compared with 15,016 in the previous year. This was the highest number of knife crime offences reported in London during this provided time period. Between 2015/16 and 2019/20, knife crime in London increased yearly, with a particularly large increase occurring between 2016/16 and 2017/18. A wider trend The increase in knife crime witnessed in London has occurred alongside a general increase in overall crime throughout England and Wales. In 2022/23, there were approximately 6.74 million crime offences across England and Wales, compared with just over four million ten years earlier. During a similar time period, the number of knife homicides also increased, and reached 282 in 2017/18, compared with 186 in 2014/15. Due to strict gun laws in the United Kingdom, firearms are rarely used to commit homicides, with knives or other sharp instruments being used in over 46 percent of homicides in 2023/24. Acid and moped attacks While knife crime in London has certainly been given a lot of attention by the British media, the increase in acid and moped attacks during the same time period also generated many headlines. In 2017, for example, there were 471 acid attacks recorded by the Metropolitan Police, compared with just 51 in 2007. Moped crime also reached high levels in 2017, with both types of crime declining to much lower levels by the early 2020s. Although overall crime in London continued to rise until 2019/20, this fell back during the COVID-19 pandemic, but by 2023/24, the number of crimes committed in the capital had exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

Context

London is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London

Content

This data counts the number of crimes at two different geographic levels of London (LSOA and borough) by year, according to crime type. Includes data from 2008 to present. Crime categories are included in the BigQuery table description.

Fork this kernel to get started with this dataset.

Acknowledgements

https://data.london.gov.uk/

https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/bigquery-public-data:london_crime?_ga=2.189454959.-577194880.1523455401

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/greater-london-authority/london-crime?filter=category:public-safety

This dataset is publicly available for anyone to use under the following terms provided by the Dataset Source — http://www.data.gov/privacy-policy#data_policy — and is provided "AS IS" without any warranty, express or implied, from Google. Google disclaims all liability for any damages, direct or indirect, resulting from the use of the dataset.

Banner Photo by Luca Micheli from Unplash.

Inspiration

What is the change in the number of crime incidents from 2011 to 2016?

What were the top 3 crimes per borough in 2016?

Part of Release: Official Sub-Ward, Ward and Borough level crime counts.

Choose from the three data sets (‘Sub-Ward data’, ‘Ward data’ or ‘Borough data’) according to your requirements.

This page contains the ward level data files

Click here for corresponding LSOA level data: Recorded Crime Summary Data for London: LSOA Level

Click here for corresponding ward level data: Recorded Crime Summary Data for London: Ward Level

Choose from the three data sets (‘Sub-Ward data’, ‘Ward data’ or ‘Borough data’) according to your requirements.

‘Sub-Ward data’ counts the number of crimes in each sub ward area of London (Census Lower Super Output Area or LSOA) per month according to crime type. Use this data if you need to analyse crime data at a sub ward level. Because not all crimes can be matched to a specific LSOA area, you should not use this data set to count crimes by ward or borough. For these purposes use one of the other datasets according to the level of geographic precision you need.

‘Ward data’ counts the number of crimes in each ward area of London per month, according to crime type. Use this data if you need to analyse crime data according to the location of geographic wards. Because not all crimes can be matched to a ward area, you should not use this data set to count crimes by borough. For this purpose use one of the Borough level dataset provided.

‘Borough data’ counts the number of crimes in each borough area of London per month, according to crime type.

Each of the data sets will contain the latest two years of data available. The categories of crime counts within them may change from time to time. Below is a list of the crime types you can currently extract (*only at borough or ward level):

Minor Category: Major Category

Murder: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

CommonAssault: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

OffensiveWeapon: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

Harassment: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

Otherviolence: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

AssaultWithInjury: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

WoundingGBH: ViolenceAgainstThePerson

*Rape: SexualOffences

*OtherSexual: SexualOffences

PersonalProperty: Robbery

BusinessProperty: Robbery

BurglaryInADwelling: Burglary

BurglaryInOtherBuildings: Burglary

TheftOrTakingOfMotor: TheftAndHandling

TheftFromMotor: TheftAndHandling

MotorInterferenceAndTampering: TheftAndHandling

TheftFromShops: TheftAndHandling

TheftOrTakingOfPedalCycles: TheftAndHandling

OtherTheftPerson: TheftAndHandling

OtherTheft: TheftAndHandling

HandlingStolenGoods: TheftAndHandling

*CountedPerVictim: FraudOrForgery

*OtherFraudAndForgery: FraudOrForgery

CriminalDamageToADwelling: CriminalDamage

CriminalDamageToOtherBldg: CriminalDamage

CriminalDamageToMotor: CriminalDamage

OtherCriminalDamage: CriminalDamage

DrugTrafficking: Drugs

PossessionOfDrugs: Drugs

OtherDrugOffences: Drugs

GoingEquipped: OtherNotifiableOffences

OtherNotifiable: OtherNotifiableOffences

Each row of data in the data sets contains:

*The number of incidents according to the Month Recorded, the specific crime type, and the Location

*The Month Recorded

*The broad crime type (Major HO category – eg Robbery)

*The specific crime type (Minor HO category – eg Robbery: Personal Property)

*The Location (Sub –Ward, Ward or borough depending on the data set selected)

Raw data on crime supplied by the Metropolitan Police Service and the Mayors Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC). Pan-London data includes: - Total Notifiable Offences - Total Victim-based crime (and Sanctioned Detection Rates) - Violence against the Person - Violence with injury (VWI) (and SDR) - Serious Youth Violence - Female victims of robbery & Violence with Injury - Rape - Knife Crime (and SDR) - Knife Crime with Injury - Gun Crime (and SDR) - Gun Crime with firearm discharged - Gang violence indicator - Dog Attacks (and SDR) - Homicide - Sexual Offences - Burglary (all) - Burglary (residential) - Robbery (all) - Theft & Handling - Theft from Person - Theft of Motor Vehicle - Theft from Motor Vehicle - Criminal Damage* - Domestic Offences - Homophobic Hate Victims - Racist & Religious Hate Victims - Faith Hate Victims - Disability Hate Victims - Stop & Search Totals (and related Arrest rate) - Police Strengths - Officer/Sergeant/Staff/Special Constable/PCSO - Satisfaction/Confidence in the Metropolitan Police Service (ease of contact/satisfaction with action taken/well-informed/fairly treated/overall satisfaction/overall confidence) NB. Quarterly data - Crime-related calls to Police by category - Anti-Social Behaviour-related calls to Police by category Borough data includes: - Fear of crime ("to what extent are you worried about crime in this area?") NB. Quarterly data NB. Action Fraud have taken over the recording of fraud offences nationally on behalf of individual police forces. This process began in April 2011 and was rolled out to all police forces by March 2013. Data for Greater London is available from Action Fraud here.

Little London & Woodhouse, Leeds full crime rankings and individual crime statistics updated monthly. See how safe Little London & Woodhouse, Leeds is as well as all recent crimes.

The GLA conducted a representative survey of Londoners to understand attitudes towards violent crime. The survey was carried out by YouGov for the GLA between 23rd – 28th July 2021, with a response of 1,123 London residents aged 18+. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all London adults (aged 18+). Some figures have been compared against a previous survey carried out by YouGov for the GLA between 30th July – 2nd August 2018, with a response of 1,191 London residents aged 18+.