The Maldives Police Service revamped their website on the 29th, adding some interesting online services to their website. One of the things that I caught my interest was the crime statistics, a month by month tally of different crime categories from 2008 to 2012. As far as I am aware of, these data has not been easily, publicly available before. The data listing displayed on the site, while interesting, doesn't facilitate an understanding of the trends over the period - which I was more interested to see.

Anyway, I scraped the data from the site, put into a table on Google Spreadsheet and made a small trend chart. I am sharing it here in case anyone else is interested in such too. The data used for the chart can be accessed and downloaded in the related sheet.

There are a few interesting things that can be seen.
- Crime was apparently very low at the beginning of 2008, was high for much of 2009 and came back to 2009 levels in 2011.
- There is a drop in theft from 2009 to 2011.
- Traffic related issues has continued to drop through the years.
- Drug crimes reached a major peak at the end of 2008 and had a significant drop through 2009-2010.

Smoothing the trending lines should give a better view of overall trends but that's for another time...

- View chart on Google Spreadsheet and download data