Has anyone seen the recently released crime maps on police.uk?
The Surbiton numbers seem very high - 277 crimes in December. This is almost exactly the same as the levels of crime in Richmond and Twickenham which are both much larger towns and one of them has regular events at an 80,000 capacity stadium to police.
Kingston is off the scale due to the nightclub situation.
The strange thing about the Surbiton numbers is that the crime is spread very evenly throughout the area. There were very slight peaks at the station and the Alpha estate as you would expect, but these represented under 10% of the crime between them.
Perhaps the most worrying statistic is that there were 31 'violent crimes' in one month!
I personally feel very safe walking around Surbiton at all hours. The YMCA seems to have been cleaned up a bit and there doesn't seem as many dodgy people hanging around the station. I obviously walk on the other side of the road from Corky's bar!
What does everyone else think?
Comments
Those figures are a bit of a concern..... Hmmmm.
I saw these figures too and was shocked, i must admit. I was not expecting to see a crime free area, but the number of violent crimes seemed very high and not a little unsettling. I've lived in Surbiton for 4 years now and regularly travel back to the station from London late at night, often i've experienced/witnessed drunks etc. in the immediate station vicinity, the area in front of Corky's mainly ( or whatever its called now) and occasionally on Claremont Road but honestly wasn't expecting to see such high figures for the rest Surbiton.
Would be interested to hear others comments and experinences, have i been lucky to avoid anything serious?, or are these figures distorting our views?
I don't think that you have been lucky to avoid anything serious. Most of the roads outside the immediate town centre only register a maximum of 1 or 2 crimes in the whole 31 days of December, so you would have been quite unlucky to be a the wrong place at the wrong time.
A lot of the crime seems to be marked as 'Anti Social Behaviour'. Although these incidents can be serious, a lot of them are likely to be trivial (e.g. the fake homeless person shouting outside HSBC or a stupid chav outside MacDonalds having an argument with one of his 'bredren'). I am not syaing that these are not anti social, but they are not really going to put normal people at risk, just the idiots who talk to these people.
Overall, however, I was also surprised to see the relatively high numbers of crimes being reported in Surbiton, especially when compared to other areas that I would have considered to be higher crime. I have always felt safe in Surbiton, but feel less so knowing that there was more than one incident of 'violent crime' in December :(