Crime maps showing which counties are most affected by different crimes have revealed West Yorkshire as the region with the greatest number of incest offences.

The Examiner's Data Unit has created a string of 'crime cartograms' - maps where areas are made bigger or smaller according to how many, or few, of a particular offence they have seen.

They show, at a glance, how our region has a hugely disproportionate problem with incest and other family-related sex crimes compared to other parts of England and Wales.

But some other crimes - like theft of mail - are relatively rare in West Yorkshire.

Scroll down to view the crime maps

Map one : Context

The first map - purely for context - shows a Britain stretched and skewed according to how many people live in each police force area.

How many people live in each police force area
How many people live in each police force area

This is how we would expect each individual crime map to look if the specific offence was spread equally across the country.

Map two: Incest

Now let's look at how the map changes when we feed in the figures for incest and familial sexual offences.

Incest and family-related sex offences
Incest and family-related sex offences


Immediately we see how West Yorkshire appears to have rocketed in size.
That is because there were 94 such offences in our region in the 12 months to the end of September - far more than any other part of the country.
The Metropolitan police area, covering London, had just 14.
The place with the second most was actually Kent, with 58.

Map three: Homicide

The number of homicides - murders and manslaughters - was roughly proportionate to the size of population across the country.

Homicide
Homicide


Map four: Firearms offences

But some types of crime seem to be very clearly concentrated in different parts of the country.
West Yorkshire actually fares fairly badly when it comes to possessing firearms with intent to commit a criminal offence.

How many people live in each police force area
How many people live in each police force area

Our region had 98 such crimes in the year to the end of September, the same as the West Midlands, which has a larger population.

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Map five: Blackmail

The picture looks much better when we turn to blackmail.

Blackmail
Blackmail

Here West Yorkshire is actually smaller than on the original map, while London had swollen hugely. That is because there were 1,607 blackmail crimes in the Metropolitan area in the 12 months to the end of September - more than a third of the 4,323 across England and Wales as a whole.

Map six: Theft of mail

Finally, theft of mail seems clearly to be a 'southern' problem.

Mail theft
Mail theft

The Metropolitan police force had 835 such cases in the year ending September 30.
Thames Valley had 227, while Essex had 202.
By contrast West Yorkshire had just 24.


The statistics are taken from data.police.uk - the official source of crime figures in England and Wales.