The Crime Prevention Website

I’ve recently returned from Newquay in Cornwall where Julia and I have been looking around the town for areas where we might like to live when we move down there next year.

One important consideration for us is (naturally) the distribution of crime in the area and so I’ve been looking at the freely available data on Police.uk and comparing Newquay with a few other places I am familiar with.

It’s not that easy to compare like with like because the wards differ in geographical size and population, so instead I’ve been looking more at the share of certain crime categories and mainly the share of burglary.  In other words, Newquay Suburbs might have had 935 crimes in the year to August 2017, but how many of them are going to be of interest to me; how many are going to affect me?

It turns out that burglary is very low indeed. Only 44 reports of burglary across quite a wide area or a 4.71% share of all the crime, which compares well with where I live now, which had 97 burglaries, representing 10.85% of the 894 crime incident reports in the same time period.

It’s also noticeable that almost one third of crime reports in Newquay Suburbs occur in July and August; the ‘mad six weeks’ as it is referred to by locals when the population doubles during the summer holidays (that’s when I shall go and visit friends methinks).

So, if you’re planning to move next year do take a look at Police.uk before selecting your neighbourhood.  The reported crimes don’t highlight individual addresses, but they do show you which roads get most crime.  You can also use Google’s Street View to check out the area and to look at the various houses and streets you might be interested in.

A couple of years ago I produced a guide to crime prevention when moving for ADT, the alarm people, but you can print off my checklist version of it straight off this website.  The guide gets you to ask a lot more questions about the area than simply ‘how much crime is there?’ and so it’s worth taking a look.

Moving Home Guide https://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/home-security-assessment/680/moving-home-and-security/

blog comments powered by Disqus