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28 Apr 2008

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?

• Posted by Lindsey on 28/04/08 at 11:49am
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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Categories

• "What do we want?"
  • Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
  • Design: Co-creation
    • Online Maps
  • Design: user-oriented
  • Foundation of Trust
    • Identity
    • Data nitwittery
  • Save Time and Money
• Greener government IT
• Pertinent Art
• Power of Information
• Political engagement
• "Transformational Government"
• Government Procurement
• Across the Board
• Ideal Goverment - project

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