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