Crime and Safety in Shrewsbury

Every month, CrimeRate processes crime reports from data.police.uk, the UK's official source of raw crime report data. Each crime report has an anonymised coordinate pair attached to it, most often "snapped" to the middle of the nearest street, or to the nearest major landmark, if available. The month and year of the crime report is also included, along with what type of crime was reported.

Data releases on data.police.uk happen once a month, and the data has a two-month delay. This means that, for example, crimes reported in Shrewsbury during June 2024 will typically become available in August 2024.

CrimeRate locates the UK region, county, and town/city/village locality for each crime report, and calculates the crime rate by taking the sum of all crime reports, dividing it by the locality's daytime / "workday" population, and multiplying the result by 1,000 to get the crime rate per 1,000.

For Shrewsbury, CrimeRate uses the geographic boundaries provided by The Office for National Statistics in the December 2023 release of their Parishes and Non Civil Parished Areas dataset, using the PARNCP23CD column value E04011358. This map shows an outline of the Shrewsbury boundaries currently in use:

Due to the 2021 Census being conducted during a UK-wide Coronavirus lockdown, the daytime population figures released so far cannot be relied on for purposes such as comparing crime rates. Instead, CrimeRate uses Shrewsbury's daytime - or "workday" - population of 80,017 from the ONS 2011 Census for calculations throughout the site.

All geographic boundaries use the full resolution - extent of the realm versions where provided to avoid missing crime reports near coastlines and rivers - the banks of the Thames in particular - that would otherwise not be included when using the clipped to the coastline datasets.

The boundaries and population figures used by CrimeRate were refreshed during March 2024.