Visualising Crime Along Routes: Robbery density along London's Oxford Street

May 11, 2025

Visualising Crime Along Routes

This example visualises the density of robbery along Oxford Street in London, using open data from police.uk.

It’s inspired by the work of Alasdair Rae, who previously shared a technique for mapping elevation profiles along rail and road routes. This is a variation on that approach, applied to crime data for ‘hot route’ analysis.

The map was created quickly and easily in QGIS, using the marker and line geometry generators to show incident density along the route.

How to Replicate

1. Create points along a line at equal intervals.
2. Assign values to those points — in this example, values were sampled from a heatmap of robbery incidents using ‘Sample Raster Values’.
3. Use the following expressions in the geometry generator to visualize the values:

Marker Geometry Generator

make_point(x($geometry), y($geometry) + "YourValueColumn" * 10)

Line Geometry Generator

make_line(
  $geometry,
  make_point(x($geometry), y($geometry) + "YourValueColumn" * 10)
)

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🔗 Tools used: QGIS
📊 Data source: data.police.uk
💡 Concept credit: Alasdair Rae

The written content of this page was enhanced for flow and layout using ChatGPT.