Testing to see if there is a significant change in crime figures over time?

Hi all,

Apologies if my terminology is incorrect here - its been a while since
I did any true statistics.

I have a set of crime counts for a particular area covering a three
year period (crime counts are for each day).

I have plotted these crimes on a graph (aggregated for each month) and
have found that a trend line appears to shows me that the number of
crimes appears to be increasing over time. While the graph is useful
I was wondering if there is a significance test or quantitative way
that I could test to see if this change is significant.

I will be likely to run this same process every financial quarter so
would like to have a way of testing how things are changing (if indeed
they are at all).

I realise that I could be on the wrong track here and that perhaps I
should be taking a different approach all together, so please let me
know if you think I should try something else!

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Kevin

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