Posted: February 26th, find 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from the media coverage we received in the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph today. Since we launched UKCrimeStats last April, here we’ve always made clear that the official police data that we use that gives us Easting/Northings which can be mapped to a street are not a precise location of the crime. To date we have around 7 million crime and ASB incidents that are mapped to 536, 000 snap-points which are locations deemed to be on a street near or close to where the incident actually took place. So problem number 1 is accuracy.

Problem number 2 is that not all streets are equal. They vary hugely in length, the number of people living in them and what they have on them that may attract a high transient population or footfall because they are high streets for example. We have no street level population data to deflate for the impact of crime by using a crime rate (recorded crime per 1,000 residents).

Problem number 3  is when police.uk decides unilaterally to change the snap-points without telling the 3rd party developers. This happened last month. Here’s a video we’ve prepared to help you understand the consequences.

We’re all for increasing the accuracy of the snap-points but it does mean that all previous history becomes void – that’s why many of our individual streets like St James Street in Weston Super Mare are showing zero crimes for December 2011. Perhaps it’s because we have kept a history of which snap-points accumulated the most crime that they realised there needed to be more granularity.

Problem number 4 is that we know that sometimes crimes with no location are allocated to a street with a Police Station but we don’t know how many or where the Police Stations are. This has a distortionary affect on the street crime level for that street but we are unable to filter it out.

Problem number 5 is please don’t blame us for just representing the official data. We really don’t understand the ill-thought through comments by a spokesperson for Avon and Somerset Police in the Sunday Times today. We’re always happy to explain  how we calculate our figures to the Police and Press, have done so in the past and will continue to do so. Just wish Avon and Somerset had given us a call first !

Our data is the same as on Police.uk – what we do differently is to aggregate the data so that we can tell who has the most and of what kind or the biggest increase of crime between or over two different time points. That is one of our unique services we provide and a very useful tool for the general public and for the NPIA as well because we find errors in the data that they can’t see and we continue to log on our Forum. However, police.uk have not released the same points of interest that they recently uploaded from the ONS – so we don’t necessarily know if there’s a nightclub nearby although as we use google maps and we also unlike police.uk have a satellite view – you can always zoom in and have a look yourself.

Despite all these caveats, problem number 6 is that everyone still wants to know about streets – it’s one of the most popular sections on UKCrimeStats. So we have created new pages for the new snap points – but they are not actually always on or near a street. So please bear in mind all these points if you want to know which streets have the most Total Crime / Burglary, ASB, Violent Crimes etc. . . .

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Posted: February 26th, seek 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Today, we launch a major new advance in UKCrimeStats. We’ve come a long way since April last year when I wrote this post – 10 reasons why UKCrimeStats is better than Police.uk and not much has changed since then with the government’s taxpayer-funded website.

In the meantime, sovaldi sale we’ve done a lot and are about to move into a much higher gear. Just take a look at this abbreviated list of additional features, some of which we launched today;

As open data enthusiasts,  we’re pleased to say a lot of what we offer continues to be free to view, is growing and is not available from Police.uk who have not designed their site that way. We’ve now decided to create a low-entry cost membership because there has been demand for some more intensive data-crunching and that takes – not free or cheap – computing power. There’s so much more analysis that can be done with the data than we have time to do with it. So please join us and do your own research – membership starts at £9.99 a month or buy one of our papers and get a 2 week trial. Or get the discounted annual rate of £99 – see our membership page for details. As always, let us know what you think – we welcome your feedback.

Finally, in 2012, we look forward to much more innovation – and with elected Police and Crime Commissioners on the way, the role of independent crime data analysis is more important than ever. So we’d just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone  for their continued support and shared interest.

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Posted: February 22nd, cialis 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Thanks for your patience – this month we had to add another 100, look 000 snap points rather than a few thousand and we had a number of new capabilities that needed testing – it’s all very time-consuming. So apologies for the delay but we hope you will feel it was worth the wait. What is coming;

1. New areas to see crime around. We’ve added a massive increase of places where you can see what crime is like in a radius or defined boundaries around them. Including Subdivisions like County Councils, County Wards etc. all the way to Welsh Assembly Constituencies. Then we’ve broken down crime and ASB by postcode district (that’s the first half of your postcode), put in 50,000 education establishments, all train stations, London tube stations, even bus stops !
2. New analysis function. For the first time, you will be able to easily see which Police Force, etc. had the biggest increase/decrease between 2 specific points of time – by percentage or by total
3. Exportable results. There are over 5,000 neighbourhoods and around 2,400 postcode districts – you can export them all to excel and slice and dice the data to your heart’s content.
4. National crime heatmap – anywhere you want. You will be able to type in your postcode and generate a heatmap for a selected radius anywhere in England and Wales.

One specific capability – the analysis page – means that we spot errors very quickly in the source data which is not the same as our representation of the data which we are confident is correct. Police.uk data is not perfect and the earliest data was generally the least accurate. Please refer to this post http://www.ukcrimestats.com/forum/topic/when-the-data-is-wrong-but-our-representation-is-correct-sedgefield-constit to understand this point further.

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Posted: February 7th, unhealthy cure 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

If you didn’t see this short report on Channel 4 news last night, try watch it on catchup tv here. It’s good to see that West Midlands Police are experimenting with this and now about to roll it out across Birmingham. For all that, when I heard the reporter say ”Ironically, America stole the idea from Britain” I was very suprised.

It’s important to give credit where credit is due. Over the last few months, I’ve been reading the free to view academic papers of P. Jeffrey Brantingham – see under Publications – and he seems to me to be head and shoulders above everyone else and has been for a number of years. So patriotic man that I man, I don’t really believe we stole the idea from America !

For now, this kind of high level predictive policing in case you’re wondering, falls some way short of Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

It requires static, inanimate victims of crime – like cars and houses – rather than anticipating a combination of human victim and criminal behaviour.

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