Crime Hotspots
Submitted by: Corinne Pritchard
Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?
I really hope this already exists, but use the neighbourhood statistics (specifically crime, though it could be any of them) and map them to the middle layer regions to form a complete map of every local authority region in the UK.
Allow people, police and local authorities to enter a postcode and get a breakdown for that area with comparisons available to the national average, and to surrounding wards.
It would:
- help community groups fight their cause and get more resources if their region was particularly under threat, and give them a target towards reducing crime and criminal intent,
- give police the ability to locate hotspots of activity and particular types of crime, and local authorities more power to allocate resources to those areas
- Insurance companies and people alike would have the same power to understand how much to charge, where to move to, and where to move away from.
There is a difference between scaremongering and providing full access to information - let people make up their own minds by giving them full access not only to the facts, but also over time to how they change if effective measures are put in place.
What information or services do you need?
Neighbourhood statistics, mapping facilities, any other crime stats that are floating around.
Some consistency on how crime figures are reported wouldn't go amiss, either. Only then can people make successful comparisons.
Posted by darrylxxx on 04 July 2008 at 03:41 PM
I said above I would share our work... http://banjax.com/sandbox/crime/2007/ This map is for Northern Ireland crime statistics only from 2003/04 to 2006/07 (the most up to date data we have). Anyone please contact us at http://banjax.com/ if you want to know more about the project... it's nice to communicate! Enjoy. :-)
Posted by Corinne Pritchard on 04 July 2008 at 12:30 AM
I also had a later thought that it could also be useful to programme in the future capability / present to show whether "crime reduction" facilities such as extra street lighting, cctv cameras, speed bumps, extra police presence are actually effective or would be more useful somewhere else / rethinking.
Posted by Darryl Collins on 03 July 2008 at 10:20 AM
My company, Banjax (http://banjax.com/), is working on just such an application for Northern Ireland. :-) Due to the limits of availability of crime data, it is based on annual statistics by local Ward. Still very interesting and useful. We created it as a capability building exercise for more complex applications. We should have it 'finished' later this week and I will put the URL here when it is done.
One thing that is worth noting is that N.Ireland data is quite often different and separate to GB data e.g. FixMyStreet does not yet include N.Ireland as they do not (yet?) have access to the OSNI map data.