I am trying to work with some crime data from <https://data.police.uk/data/>
The data is organised in several .csv files, one for each month and each crime is geocoded with Lat and Long. 

As the file structure might differ from month to month I cannot merge the csv together using 
copy \*.csv combined.csv in the command prompt as explained here: <https://www.itsupportguides.com/office-2010/how-to-merge-multiple-csv-files-into-one-csv-file-using-cmd/>

So I decided to use python to loop through all the csv files in the folder and create a shapefile for each one which I will then merge together at a latter stage.

This is the code I came up with after looking at this post [Convertion of multiple csv automatically to shp](https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/74966/convertion-of-multiple-csv-automatically-to-shp?rq=1), it works but it is really slow, in a couple of hours it converted only a handful of tables. Do you have any suggestion to improve my code? 

I had to use csvfile.replace('-', '\_') as the file names look like this 2012-05-metropolitan-street.csv and I cannot use "-" in the output shapefile name.

```
import arcpy,os
shpworkspace = r"G:\GIS DATA\Crime Data\CSV"
arcpy.env.workspace = shpworkspace
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True

csvlist = arcpy.ListFiles("*.csv")

try:
    for csvfile in csvlist:
        outlayer = "CSVEventLayer"
        spatialreference = "GEOGCS['GCS_WGS_1984',DATUM['D_WGS_1984',SPHEROID['WGS_1984',6378137.0,298.257223563]],PRIMEM['Greenwich',0.0],UNIT['Degree',0.0174532925199433]];-400 -400 1000000000;-100000 10000;-100000 10000;8.98315284119522E-09;0.001;0.001;IsHighPrecision"
        arcpy.MakeXYEventLayer_management(csvfile,"Longitude","Latitude",outlayer,spatialreference,"#")

        shpfile = os.path.splitext(csvfile.replace('-', '_'))[0]
        arcpy.CopyFeatures_management(outlayer,shpfile)
    del outlayer

except:
    # If an error occurred print the message to the screen
    print arcpy.GetMessages()

```