Violence against the person: Purple (and then blue) are worse, on the left is a map for midnight to 4am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. A map for the rest of the week is on the right.

If it’s possible to fall in love with a website I think I am. These maps come from the SaferView blog (where you can see the full map, rather than my cheeky cut outs), a site I regularly visit and commend.

What is shows may strike many as blindingly obvious, but it shows it remarkably clearly.

Basically colours represent the level of violence against the person, based on their deviation from the average. The palest is below average, orange is average (or within 0.5 standard deviations) and purple and blue both above average (0.5-1.5 and more than 1.5 standard deviations above average respectively).

So, on the left, late on Friday and Saturday nights the biggest problems are exactly where you would expect them. Clockwise from top-left you have the wards containing Putney High Street then Clapham Junction Northcote Road and Battersea Rise then Tooting Broadway.

Only Tooting remains above average when you look at violence against the person for the rest of the week. But what is telling are the wards that move the wrong way, going from average to above average. Roehampton, Latchmere, Queenstown and Graveney move from average to above average. (Conversely West Putney, East Putney, Balham and Bedford all move from average to below average.) If you overlaid a map of relative prosperity and deprivation there would be a close match.

Violence against the person covers a range of offences and there’s no indication of which are involved here, although I would bet alcohol is involved in many, particularly those late night ones.

It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t a map of volume of crime (which in this case is relatively low) and repeat my mantra that Wandsworth has the lowest crime rate in inner London.

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