Scottish Crime Map by Local Authority Wards

For the first time (late 2023) the Scottish Government has published recorded crime data at Local Authority ward level.  This post summarises the data and shows crime levels (normalised to crimes per 1000 population) for each ward on an interactive map of Scotland (see Figure 1).  While there are 355 local authority wards in Scotland, the published data has combined some wards, presumably due to police management of an area, thus data for Arran in North Ayrshire is combined with Ardrossan.  A number of wards in the Hebrides are not included in the map dataset because the police data does not appear to follow natural ward boundaries.

With only five full years of comparable data it is difficult to determine any trends in the data with any degree of statistical confidence although there does appear to be a dip in the numbers of recorded crimes during the period of covid-19 lockdowns, 2020 and 2021 (see Figure 2).

Data for the complete year 2023 is not yet available, this page will be updated when full data becomes available.

Further analysis will follow on additional pages on this site showing data for the whole of Scotland and for local authorities which will contain data at a ward level:

Links to Local Authority Crime Maps
Aberdeen City Crime Map
City of Edinburgh Crime Map
Dundee City Crime Map
Glasgow City Crime Map
for a full list of all local authorities see sitemap

Figure 1 All Categories Crime per 1000 Population by Scottish Ward 2022 Data
Crime rates per 1000 population were calculated and ranked into 5 bands of increasing rates (dark green, Band 1 lowest rate per 1000; light green, band 2; light orange, band 3; light purple, band 4; deep purple, band 5 – the highest crime rate per 1000).  If you click on the map the data for the past five years  (crimes per 1000 popn.) will be revealed in the pop-up.  You can zoom in to city areas using the ± navigation aid on the map and drag the map around to centre an area of interest.  Shetland Isles can be viewed by dragging the map down.

Data Sources

Scottish Crime Data is available on the police website via  https://www.scotland.police.uk/about-us/how-we-do-it/crime-data.

Shapefiles for UK Council Wards (district_borough_unitary_ward_region) is available from https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/BoundaryLine.

Ward population data was based on https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/population/population-estimates/2011-based-special-area-population-estimates/electoral-ward-population-estimates.

Methods in Brief

• Multiple annual crime data files (provided as fiscal years) were combined and calendar years were allocated to the data.
• Population data was added however, as no data was available for 2022,  the 2021 data was used for this year and rates per 1000 population calculated. Ranks for each Ward were calculated based on the Crime Rate per 1000.
• Some remapping of wards was carried out since the police data in a few cases did not map precisely to ward codes.  E.g. the police data combined Arran and Ardrossan (wards in North Ayrshire LA.  Some data is missing from the maps since it was not possible to properly map data for the Hebridean Isles as reported data appeared to be from overlapping wards.
• Maps were prepared using Python with Folium and Geopandas modules
• Figures, graphs and tables were prepared using Python and the Plotly module.