Introduction to ukpolice package

The ukpolice package downloads data from the UK Police public data API, the full docs of which are available at https://data.police.uk/docs/.

The API uses a ‘leaky bucket’ rate limiter, which allows for 15 requests per second with a burst of 30. This allows for 15 requests each second, but up to 30 in a single second at one go. The API does not require authentication.

Data is available on police forces, crimes, policing areas and stop-and-search. All functions begin with ukc_.

The example below queries stop and searches by the Metropolitan Police in December 2018, and plots them by police-reported ethnic group.

library(ukpolice)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)

london_ss <- ukc_stop_search_force("metropolitan", date = "2018-12")

london_ss2 <- london_ss %>% 
  filter(!is.na(officer_defined_ethnicity)) %>%
  group_by(officer_defined_ethnicity, outcome) %>%
  summarise(n = n()) %>%
  mutate(perc = n/sum(n))


p1 <- ggplot(london_ss2, aes(x = outcome, y = perc,
                             group = outcome, fill = outcome)) + 
  geom_col(position = "dodge") + 
  scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent,
                     breaks = seq(0.25, 0.8, by = 0.25)) + 
  scale_x_discrete(labels = scales::wrap_format(15)) + 
  theme(legend.position = "none") + 
  labs(x = "Outcome", 
       y = "Percentage of stop and searches resulting in outcome",
       title = "Stop and Search Outcomes by Police-Defined Ethnicity",
       subtitle = "Metropolitan Police Department, December 2018",
       caption = "(c) Evan Odell | 2019 | CC-BY-SA") + 
  facet_wrap(~officer_defined_ethnicity)

p1

Evan Odell

2022-01-31