Comments on: Crime mapping gets political

By: Keir Clarke

Keir Clarke — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:31:16 +0000

Ed, It’s not strictly true that I ‘scraped’ local authority websites. I used the Met Police services published crime data – which they release in xls format. The problem is that they don’t geo-tag crimes in this data below ward level. Therefore you can only get a picture of crime on a ward by ward basis.

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:40:16 +0000

@Ian, I agree we need to protect the individual victim, but too often privacy is used as an excuse not to publish data.

@Charles, my badly made point with reference to the local papers was in regard to privacy.

I agree publishing the raw statistics is fundamentally different.

BTW That is something I would really like to see, provide the raw data as well as the maps for people to mash-up. I’m sure people like my-society would be able to come up with all sorts of useful new services with access to the raw data.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:15:02 +0000

“is the situation really much different from the crime reporting in Local Newspapers ?”

Actually, if you use crime maps, it’s *really* different, because you give an accurate picture of what’s going on. Local papers do a good job, but their aim is to interest the reader – not give a dispassionate picture of what has really happened. That’s the potential benefit of crime maps.

By: colin

colin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:44:23 +0000

Spotcrime (dot) com has begun mapping crime events in London using news sources.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:59:49 +0000

saw a guy from Metro Police at the ESRI ArcGIS Server training – seems they are keen to keep up to date, as always in the public sector, budgets usually keep them down a notch on the ladder.

By: Ian Turton

Ian Turton — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:14:39 +0000

Unfortunately crime mapping is more complicated than sticking pins in a map if you want it to show any thing more than where the local night clubs are (if you map street violence) or the most houses are (burglary). Trust me, we did a lot of work back in the 90′s for police forces that was based on sound epidemiological principals and we produced some tools that could work well for an expert analyst with training. But there was no way I’d trust a member of the general public (or the tabloid press) to do crime analysis than I want them trying to find cancer clusters.

What really makes you think that a map of where crime occurs will tell you anything useful? or that the police wouldn’t fiddle the data (if they have any good data) – as an aside the biggest hotspot we usually found would be the police station as all the coppers knew it’s postcode when they were filling out a report.

As for protecting privacy I wouldn’t want my health data on the web (even at postcode level) and I can think of several crimes I might be victim to I would also prefer to keep to my self.

Ian