London Crimes: Exploring the Trends, Locations and Crime Types

Sasha Pasulka has been a good friend of mine for many years and is moving to London from the US soon in her new role with Tableau. Like anyone else that’s moving to a new country, she finds the entire process is ridiculously overwhelming. Trying to find apartments from thousands of miles away, not knowing anything about neighbourhoods, can be an incredibly daunting task. To help her, I decide to build a viz in Tableau.

I started by using the London Crimes web data connector from Tableau Junkie, only to realise that it’s somehow not returning all of the data. It looks like it returns the data via a radius versus for an entire postcode.

No worries though. Instead I went to data.police.uk and downloaded all crimes from the Metropolitan Police Service. This returned a separate CSV for each month and it also wasn’t limited to just the London area. On the London Datastore I was able to find a list of all LSOAs in the London area. Great! All I needed to do was union all of the CSVs then join them to the London LSOAs. I love that I can do all of this straight inside Tableau now.

From there, it was a matter of building a simple visualisation that allows Sasha to pick boroughs and see the crimes in those areas. Note that I set the map to only display when there are 3 or fewer boroughs selected. did this because the map was simply too slow to draw the dots. Hopefully she likes it and makes it easier for her to settle in.