At a glance
- The figures come from police.uk, the official Home Office service, not from us.
- It covers a radius of about one mile around the point you enter.
- Data is published monthly and runs roughly two months behind, so the latest month shown is the newest available.
- Map points are approximate: police.uk snaps each crime to an anonymised nearby point, never an exact address.
Check crime in your area
Enter a Birmingham postcode to see recorded crime nearby for the latest published month, broken down by type.
Source: police.uk (Home Office), Open Government Licence. Each marker is an anonymised approximate location, and several crimes are often snapped to the same point, so read the breakdown above for the real counts. Crime being recorded at a location does not mean it is unsafe; busy areas naturally record more.
How to read it
Two things trip people up. First, the map looks sparser than the numbers suggest because police.uk maps many separate crimes onto the same anonymised point, to protect victims' privacy. The bar breakdown is the accurate count; the map shows the spread. Second, raw totals follow footfall. A city-centre postcode with shops, bars and a station will always record more than a quiet residential street a mile away, without being meaningfully more dangerous to a resident.
The categories are the national police ones. "Violence and sexual offences" is a single broad bucket and is usually the largest, "anti-social behaviour" covers reports rather than charges, and "shoplifting" clusters tightly around retail areas. Use the pattern, not a single month, to get a feel for a place.
Where the data comes from
Everything here is drawn live from the police.uk open data API, which publishes street-level crime and outcomes for every force in England and Wales under the Open Government Licence. For West Midlands Police that is the same dataset the force and the Home Office publish. If you want the raw records, official crime maps and outcome data, you can go straight to the source.
Open police.uk →