Posted: January 7th, health clinic 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Of course our site – www.ukcrimestats.com –  is about British crime statistics, stuff but we can’t ignore what’s happening in America. The big picture is that nationwide in the USA, crime has fallen a lot and continues to fall even through the recession and on the way out. The hard question is why?

As this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, with rising unemployment and declining living standards, plenty of academics have got egg on their faces. Perhaps then, in the face of such inaccurate forecasting, criminologists are becoming the new economists?

Well a couple of guests on this must listen to and well-balanced radio discussion programme on America’s NPR on falling crime in the USA have some pretty firm views of why it happened – a couple of which I’ve reproduced here.  You can freely download the mp3 too – so much easier to listen to in the car than sitting in front of your pc.

Bill Bratton weighs in and argues that better Policing in NY and LA should take the majority of the credit because they targeted behaviour rather than “causes” like poverty and weather etc. which he downgrades to partial influences (quite rightly in my view). Charles Lane of the Washington Post points out that in the 90s the prison population grew 5 times faster than the population itself at 6.5% per annum. The challenge for the decade ahead though would be not just dealing with fewer resources dedicated to crime-fighting and law enforcement, but also how to get a large proportion of these inmates back into society and not relapse into crime as they would be released over the coming decade.

Many of us Brits will already have heard of Bill Bratton, his work and quest to become the first foreign-born head of the London Metropolitan Police. For background on Charles Lane, read this detailed piece by him from late last month here that highlights the peace dividend from falling crime.

The discussion came about because  academic criminologist, Franklin E. Zimring, wrote this book The City that Became Safe – New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and its Control. There seems be to an abridged pdf of 29 pages here too if you don’t want to buy the book – I haven’t read it yet.

It strikes me that the level of debate on crime and more importantly, the freedom of Police Forces to experiment,  is far more advanced in America than it is here. For all that, based on a national arithmetic mean – almost totally useless as that is ! – recorded crime is still generally lower in Britain than America.

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Posted: January 3rd, cure 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

We have just rolled out a new capability to UKCrimeStats – a unique page with monthly history for every street (see our streets page here) that has had a crime on it. Here is London’s Oxford Street – scene of a terrible gang murder right in the middle of the Boxing Day.

As you’ll see from our National Picture page, thus far we have approximately 6 million crimes and ASB events spanning 12 months of data. Each of these are mapped to around 450,000 “snap points” which are the given latitudes and longitudes of on or near a street close to where the event actually took place by the authorities to protect victims’ anonymity and ongoing legal/investigative proceedings.

Population is nearly everything in crime – read this academic paper An Excursus on the Population Size-Crime Relationship. After all, with no people, there is no crime. The trouble is how to allow for the impact of population on measuring crime. One solution is the crime rate which measures crime per static 1,000 residents in a selected area. The limitation of measuring crime by crime rates is both criminals and victims like to move and resident population data is only as good as your last census.

What we don’t know is the actual mobile throughput of population in a given area which would give us a much closer understanding. That’s why Oxford Street stands out as such an interesting example. Despite it’s size and high and mobile population, it has only one snap point and so quite a lot of recorded crime. And just like for all our streets, we have no static resident population data – meaning that a very long road with many residents can’t be compared with a short one with a few village houses. We can nonetheless assume that very few people live on or around Oxford Street as residents compared to the number of visiting shoppers.

It’s a safe bet though that Oxford Street – the nation’s premier High Street, has a phenomenal throughput of bargain and style-seeking consumers which means that if you were able to deflate crime in Oxford Street for the number of people going through it, the level of crime would actually be much, much lower that it would appear – currently no. 8 for November of streets in England and Wales.

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