Yesterday, the UK Police has launched a hub for accessing their data. Read the announcement here: http://www.data.gov.uk/blog/the-launch-of-datapoliceuk

You can find it here: http://data.police.uk/

The data extracts are here: http://data.police.uk/data/

I wanted to have a look at this and see what can be done with it, but there are dozens of csv files to load in to get the full view, so this is a quick post on what I’ve been doing this evening. 

Having found an interesting post on loading multiple CSV files in T-SQL , I’ve updated it to load the files in. First though, we need to create a table to take the data.

Create the Crime_Info table

An initial table to receive the data is shown below:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Crime_Info]( 
  [Crime ID] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [Month] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [Reported by] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [Falls within] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [Longitude] [float] NULL, 
  [Latitude] [float] NULL, 
  [Location] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [LSOA code] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [LSOA name] [varchar](100) NULL, 
  [Crime type] [varchar](200) NULL, 
  [Last outcome category] [varchar](max) NULL, 
  [Context] [varchar](max) NULL 
) ON [PRIMARY] WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE )

Note that I Page compressed the table as I wanted to reduce the space it took up. It went down from 3GB to around 1.5GB.

Load the Crime files

I’ve modified the bulk load script mentioned above, and you can download it here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2765900/Load_UK_Crime_Data.sql

Once loaded, I had 15,668,549 rows of data, sitting in a 1.2GB database.

Then, by playing with PowerPivot you can create ‘fun’ visualisations like this.

Have fun, and as they say on Crimewatch: “Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well.”