THERE were more than 40,000 crimes recorded in Bolton last year, with one street seeing more than 200 incidents.

Allsopp Street, across the road from Bolton Railway Station is top of the list according to police recordings of crime in Bolton from September 1 2017 and August 31 2018.

Of the top ten streets, six are in the town centre, with the others in Burnden, Farnworth and Little Lever.

Crimes are recorded by category and the most common type of incident in Bolton falls under violence and sexual offences, making up a quarter of all crime. This covers a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving through to serious assaults, murder and sexual assault.

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The second most common kind of offences are anti-social behaviour and public order issues, jointly making up another quarter of all incidents.

In total, crime across England has been on the rise and this is also true in Bolton, but police say it comes down to changes in the way criminal incidents are recorded.

Town centre police sergeant Peter Crowe explained that the increase comes down to an improvement in the police's methods of recording crime.

Officers used to spend more time determining whether what a person said about whether a crime had taken place was accurate.

Now, they will listen to reports from people and record crimes more quickly and with less investigating after receiving a call.

"We see an awful lot more crimes coming in because we look at it from a victims' perspective and we trust the victims more," Sgt Crowe explained.

"It comes down to the fact that our crime recording is better than it ever used to be.

"We used to have officers take a lot of time to investigate before we recorded something as a crime.

"Now we will investigate for 24 hours and that helps to ensure that all crimes recorded quickly."

Doing things in this way means that more of the calls that the emergency services receive go down as official crimes than used to be the case.

The top ten:

  1. Allsopp Street, Bolton - 221 crimes recorded
  2. Kinlay Road, Farnworth - 194 crimes recorded
  3. Bridge Street, Bolton - 165 crimes recorded
  4. Nelson Square, Bolton - 153 crimes recorded
  5. Bank Street, Bolton - 150 crimes recorded
  6. Chancery Lane, Bolton - 145 crimes recorded
  7. Third Avenue, Little Lever - 139 crimes recorded
  8. Cyril Street, Burnden - 136 crimes recorded
  9. Manchester Road, Bolton - 133 crimes recorded
  10. Ridgeway Gates, Bolton - 130 crimes recorded

One explanation for the top two streets on this list is that officers record crime by a street near a particular landmark. For example, Kinlay Road is in the centre of the Royal Bolton Hospital's campus so incidents that occur at the hospital could be marked as happening on that particular road.

Another important aspect to note is that different policing bodies, such as GMP and the British Transport Police - who deal with crime on the railway - will sometimes record the same crime independently, meaning it is being counted twice. This happens, as Sgt Crowe explained, so that officers can ensure nothing is missed.

Bolton's crime figures were taken from data provided by GMP.