Ambulance Call Outs to Assault Incidents

Count of all Assault incidents and injuries recorded by London Ambulance Service, per month, per ward in London for a rolling two year period.

The London Analysts Support site team (LASS) have developed this dataset in consultation with the Ambulance service to make their data more suitable for crime analysis purposes. Please note: The primary purpose of the London Ambulance Service is to save lives and respond effectively to medical emergencies. The data provided here is an extract of ambulance data which is recorded to monitor their performance to this end.

The LASS team work with the ambulance service to extract data suitable for crime analysis professionals, with the aim of causing minimum disruption to frontline services.

These incidents of assault injury have been identified through a fairly sophisticated search through various codes and descriptions of incidents that occur in the process of responding to a 999 call. This has been done in close consultation with the ambulance service to ensure that the data is fit for crime analysis purposes. It should be considered that the precision of the crime related information, in the above said process, is of secondary consideration to the need to record accurate medical information, therefore the accuracy of the data may have minor variations over time and in different areas of London. LASS work closely with the London Ambulance Service to ensure that there is no significant impact on the quality of information for crime related purposes.

Crime analysts use this data to scan for issues, patterns and trends in general violent crime in London. They compare and contrast with traditional sources of intelligence such as recorded crime data from the police. Recently this data set has been used in the Mayor's meetings with the police to identify violent crime hotspots that were not previously recognised. There are ongoing improvements to improve the data collection process. We will be updating the metadata and providing more information in due course. Please contact the LASS team if you have queries or comments, quoting the Datastore project.