A lot of people ask us about Scottish crime data. It exists, but unlike with England, Wales and NI, it’s much less detailed and only available on an annual basis, every few years. Here you can compare side by side;
| Attributes | Scotland | Rest of UK |
| Frequency | Annual last 2017/18 | Monthly back to 2011 |
| Accuracy | Matched to datazone only | Semi-anonymised lat/longs, +/- up to 400 metres, matchable to all shapes |
| Type of crime | Only 1 generic category | 14 categories including ASB |
| Police Forces | 1 – Police Scotland | 43 – excluding British Transport Police |
So what this basically means is that you can’t compare crime in Scotland with the rest of the UK because it’s a very different dataset. However, what we can and do do, is to match all Scottish postcodes to inside their relevant datazones – of which there are 6,976 with a population fo 500-1000 – so that when you type in your postcode, you can compare crime between datazones using a postcode as the starting point, so long as you are not comparing postcodes in the same datazone. This also means it is possible to give each Scottish postcode a percentile ranking, but also compare datazones by total crime, crime rate, crime per hectare and crime rate per hectare which you can do on UKCrimeStats.