The www.police.uk website, which gives you local crime figures and local crime maps, has now been operating for over a year.
So we can now compare figures for January 2012 with 12 months before.
The best way to see it is by actually going to the website yourself .
But here’s some basic information.
The figures for Rayleigh last January are as follows:
This compares with the following figures for January 2011:
As you can see , recorded crime is quite a bit higher (with a big increase in burglaries) but anti-social behaviour is about the same..
Any increase in crime is bad news but before you put up the steel shutters and hide under the duvet take a look at this report for Hackney:
http://www.police.uk/crime/?q=London%20Borough%20of%20Hackney,%20Greater%20London,%20UK#crimetypes/2012-01