Crime mapping?

“It is time for our response to crime to catch up with other walks of life that have been opened up to the information revolution. The web has revolutionised people’s access to information and their application of it, and an important part of this has been the democratisation of mapping.”
Boris Johnson’s Crime Manifesto

I have been to a couple of mayoral hustings recently and at both Boris Johnson has championed his policy of ‘Crime mapping’. As part of his desire to increase links between the police and local communities, he would like every police authority to publish the crime statistics for their local area. As well as monthly meetings between community members and borough commanders, he would like to offer the public electronic maps showing crime hotspots and local crime trends. These would build on the monthly publishing of stats currently published by The Met police. He points to Chicagocrime.org, Google, upmystreet.com and Streetmap as current examples of online mapping technology the Home Office could make use of to build this.

He believes this would create ‘a police service accountable to you’.....

So is this an example of designing public services for the needs of the citizen? Giving the public the information they want/need in an easy, accessible way?
Or is this an expensive use of police money and time? For it to work it would take constant updating and reliable technology. And actually would we feel any safer if we knew we lived near a crime hotspot-do we need to be told which bits of London are more dangerous than others? Boris thinks that improving the availability of crime data to the public will improve community engagement.

What do you think?

Published by Lindsey on 28/04/08 at 11:49am

Comments

Have yo seen what the West Midlands already have? http://www.myneighbourhood.info/

Reply by Glyn on 04/28/08 at 2:26 pm
Clay Shirky in an almost wholly unrelated essay, which is nonetheless very well worth reading in its own right, has a pertinent passage:

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing.

So can we avoid the dilemma in the post by asking whether it should be for the police to create crime maps in the first place - not just because crime reported to the police is known to be a poor proxy for crimes people experience, but also because “here be dragons” may be a better way of annotating such maps anyway.

Reply by Public Strategist on 04/28/08 at 9:51 pm
The cost of maintaining a crime map using a google interface is minimal. Our company in the US, does it for free. One advantage of police provided crime maps is that they are crime agnostic. All crimes get reported rather than being filtered by a news organization.

Colin Drane Spotcrime (dot) com

Reply by Colin Drane on 04/29/08 at 11:50 am
"He believes this would create ‘a police service accountable to you’.....”

How? In tonights newspaper was the story of a family who were attacked by axe-wielding thieves who ransacked their house. They called 999 and it took the police THREE HOURS to arrive. In what way would they be accountable?

We need to be able to elect our local police chiefs.

Reply by Dave Birch on 04/29/08 at 10:01 pm
By no means is a crime map a panacea. It is just another tool to help. By making it public, it becomes a tool of the public. It is likely that the entire consequences of making the information public is unknown, but highly probable that they are positive.

Reply by Colin Drane on 04/30/08 at 10:43 pm
I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t think the police should do it. They should provide the data, along with some way to query it, and should provide an api so that people can implement their own neat ideas.

I also don’t think that it would make the police more accountable - but it might help to bring people’s perception of crime closer to reality, and that” really important.

Reply by harry metcalfe on 05/11/08 at 7:16 pm

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