It's semi-official Wapping is not a violent crime hotspot*

The blog 'Less Crime' has published a map of violent and sexual crime hotspots using police open data. It focusses on hotspots of violent crime. The full map of London can be downloaded here (PDF) and the blog post discussing the map is here. I recommend a read.

I've taken a screen grab of the map showing Tower Hamlets. The numbers in black circles relate to the ranking of the worst hotspots in London - Shoreditch is teh second worst and Whitechapel is the fifth. The data relates to 2012-13. All of the 20 hotspots on the full map have more than 750 violent crimes in a 1km radius in one year.

What is striking is how there is very little colour south of The Highway. There's a little colour around Prusom Street/Wapping Lane/Wapping High street, but because of the way the data is recorded (and further how the map is generated), location of crimes on the map isn't a true representation, but shows that Wapping is not like much of Tower Hamlets.

It's useful to note the caveats on the Less Crime blog on the wide variety of crimes that fall under the violent and sexual crime banner, but I think it's a very useful tool to understand that underlying crime rates for certain areas may be driven by spillover from certain hotspots and by presenting hotspots, the data is more readily understandable than the Police's own mapping.


*I say semi-official because it's based on official data, but analysed by a competent third party.