UK crime mapping view of London
The UK Home Office, the central policing hub for the UK, released a countrywide online crime mapping system last year. The application was so popular that on the day that it went live to the public, it shut down because there was so much online traffic. It was soon up again soon, but there was a very public debate about the quality of the maps, their lack of detail, and the public’s concern that their home prices would be adversely affected by publically identifying high-crime areas.
The debate had died down a bit until recently when Charles Arthur write an article for the Guardian titled, “UK police crime maps gets an API—but how useful is it really?” Although Arthur agrees that releasing police data to the public is a good idea in concept, he says that,
You still don’t get any useful detail. Crimes often aren’t actually assigned to real locations; they’re made vague. Sometimes you see what looks like a crime hotspot; it turns out to be the police station, because that’s where the crimes are reported. A strange mix of data protection wibblery and the British reluctance to let anyone know any sort of personal detail unless it’s on page 3 of the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, in which case anything goes, seems to apply.
What Arthur is lamenting is the British practice of what I would call “thematic mapping.” That is, instead of placing individual crime incidents on a map, the British map looks like a colored mosaic where colors represent different levels of crime in different areas. There are no specific crimes mapped, so areas are assigned labels like “high,” “average,” and “low.” As you can see by the picture of London above, this might not be entirely useful when 90% of the city is labeled at “average.”
To be fair you can access other data sets, like overall crime trends and the total number of crimes, but that information is hardly useful when you are trying to determine what the most common crime in your neighborhood might be.
The reason the Home Office has to do it this way is that there was actually legislation passed in the UK that blocked individual crimes from being shown in crime maps.
It’s unfortunate that UK legislators don’t see the value in allowing crime maps to show actual incidents—or rather that they feel protecting home prices is more important that giving citizens the information they need to keep themselves safe.
In the US, we’ve seen that the most important crime data for most citizens in the crime that happens on their own street. Citizens are much more concerned about the crime on their street than they are with crime in the city as a whole or even if their neighborhood has a relatively “high” or “low” level of crime as compared to other neighborhoods. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most people are aware if they live in a “high” crime area. But that vague label does not tell them that car burglaries are the most common crime in their neighborhood. It does not tell them that the majority of crime near them happens on the other side of the neighborhood across the freeway.
Although here in the states, we don’t pinpoint actually addresses, we round crime to the block level, that granularity provides a mush more detailed look at crime and gives better information to citizens.
Are crime data APIs a good thing? Most certainly, but only when that API provides citizens with a good dataset they can mashup with other data to create useful application and information to keep people safe.
James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.
Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com
