Comments on: Crime mapping coming more widely as government gets on board

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:18:44 +0000

There’s some stuff on current government thinking at the Power of Information Task Force blog. http://powerofinformation.wordpress.com/

By: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:31:35 +0000

@Francis: that is initially attractive, though it would tend to under-report areas which don’t have good internet access (ie poorer estates, which arguably would need more policing) and would also be vulnerable to spoofing.

It might be useful for crime *reporting* – though I think the police have tried this and abandoned it in favour of methods where real people report the crimes to real police.

The important thing about crime mapping, for it to work well, is to make what the police know about crime transparent. Then we can go to work on how well that reflects crime that people experience.

By: Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:18:45 +0000

If UK maps were freely available then it would be extremely cheap to produce a website through which the public could report crime and anti-social behaviour based on their geographical location.

FixMyStreet.com, which was developed with Ministry of Justice funding, is open-source, and would only have to be tweaked with to achieve the desired result.