Maldives Crime Statistics Visualized: 2008 - 2011

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


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  1. Ahmed says:

    Your visualization definitely gives a more useful view of the data on the police website. I think it's good that they've made this info public from a transparency point of view.

    But I don't think that only 5 years of data is substantial enough to identify any behavioural patterns of people, taking the political climate of the past few years into perspective.

    I was expecting to see some drop of criminal activity during ramadhan. Unfortunately there wasn't any significant impact on he crime reported. :-(

    YEAR: RAMADAN 1 - 28
    2008: sep 1 - sep 28
    2009: aug 21 - sep 17
    2010: aug 10 - sep 6
    2011: jul 31 - aug 27
    (http://www.islamicity.com/prayertimes/defaulthijriconv.asp)

    However, one thing I can notice is that there is a consistent level of criminal activity in maldives wrt to certain types of crime. It could mean that authorities concerned aren't doing their job, or need to do it better to turn the slope down.

    Good post, didn't know google spreadsheet could make such nice graphs... :-D

  2. Susanna says:

    This is the first time I've been to your website. Thanks for sharing more information.

  3. muslimah says:

    Well, lots of crime is happening everyday though. Same feeling that i was expecting a less crime the day of ramadhan. Putting this case on public might warn our people to be careful on everyday living.


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