Shetland Islands Council Ward Overall Crime Map

Shetland Islands Local Authority
The Shetland Islands local authority is a low crime area with total recorded crimes of 809 in the year ending 2022. Between 2018 and 2022 crime has increased by 555 (or 219%) see Table1.

Note to recorded crime data for Shetland Isles
There appears to be a large increase (approx four fold) in the recorded crime data for 2022 compared to previous years.  This was questioned by the author who was told it may reflect differences in the way crimes are recorded/reported after the beginning of 2022 (see Table1).

Shetland Islands Wards
There are seven council Wards in Shetland Islands with a total annual recorded crime count in 2022 ranging from 26 to 338 in the wards with the lowest and highest values respectively.

Based on total crime rate per 1000 population in each ward for the year 2022, six wards (Shetland South; North Isles; Shetland Central; Shetland North; Shetland West; Lerwick South) of the seven Shetland Islands local authority council wards are in the two deciles with the lowest values, corresponding to dark green on the map. One ward (Lerwick North and Bressay) is in the two bands representing the highest crime rate per 1000, corresponding to dark purple on the map (see Table 2).

The map (Figure 1) shows the same information although in this case the Scottish Council Wards are split into five bands covering 20% range each since it is difficult to accurately portray 10 bands on colour maps.

Analysis by Crime Types is also presented below and follows the Scottish Crime Classification scheme.  Line charts for each Ward with each of the seven crime types are shown in Figure 2.

For those wishing further detail summary files and raw data files are available for download see below.

Similar data for all of the Scottish Local Authorities can be found using the Sitemap

Figure 1: Shetland Islands Council Wards Crime Map showing crimes per 1000 population in 2022
Recorded crime rates per 1000 population for the whole of Scotland at Local authority Ward level were calculated then ranked into 5 bands see legend;  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 crimes per 1000 population for the past five years will be revealed in the pop-up.  You can zoom in using the ± navigation aid on the map and drag the map around to centre an area of interest.

Table 1: Recorded Crimes in Shetland Islands

Annual crime counts for each of the seven crime classification groups and the overall total for all crimes.  Crime counts for each of the years 2018 to 2022 plus the change between 2018 and 2022 is shown.

Table 2: Shetland Islands Council Wards Crime Rates

Shetland Islands Council Wards Crime Rates By Crime Classification

Download summary crime data for Shetland Islands
(a smaller file) with data for council wards by major crime category.

Download raw data file for Shetland Islands
(a large file) with data for each council ward by major crime category further subdivided by aggregate crime classification.

Figure 2: Shetland Islands Wards – Annual Total Crimes by Crime Group

Use navigation aids within the figure to zoom, pan and reset the axis.  Click on the CGRP legend to remove a Crime Group.

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.