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. . . .

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

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.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

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.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

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.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Posted: January 30th, advice 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Whilst we wait for www.police.uk, a government-sponsored website competing in and crowding out a supposedly emerging open data marketplace,  to have a full run of publicity – The Sunday Times yesterday, press today and tomorrow – pending a late release of monthly and additional data that we as 3rd party developers were not consulted on – I wanted to highlight one of the few crimes to be growing significantly on an annual calendar basis – bike theft.

 According to the Home Office British Crime Survey figures (see table 1), over the calendar years 2009 – 2010 bike theft increased from 477,000 to 533,000 – a 12% increase. That’s over 5% of all crimes estimated to have been committed by the British Crime Survey out of 9.7 million in 2010.

Bike theft is such a problem because according to research by Halfords, in 2010 of the estimated 533,000 bikes stolen, only 115,147 were actually reported to the Police.

It’s not just that victims don’t believe the Police can do much about it. There has to be an easier way of registering crimes like these with the Police to close the gap between reported and actual theft. It also seems reasonable to get some more granularity here.  The offence of “Theft of a pedal cycle” is currently classified under “Other” crimes on our website and Police.uk. Would it really be so terrible to share with us – with the consent of the owners – where those bikes were actually stolen from?

Victims of bike theft would have far more incentive to report the loss if they knew that everyone could see where it happened on a map and at what time. We could then quickly work out where the hotspots were and owners could take additional security measures while Police Forces and local communities could start to take preventative action or at least ask some searching questions about the apparent lack of progress.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Posted: January 29th, cialis sale 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Some of you have been asking when we will have the data ready on UKCrimeStats for the month of December 2011 – so were we !

Unfortunately, find as 3rd party developers, we are beholden to the external release by Police.uk of the data which is meant to appear on the 25th of every month. Our inquiries have now established (they didn’t tell us in advance) that it won’t be ready until 31st January and we need a bit of time to put it on our own system after that.

Over on our forum section that we launched a few months ago – read the opening post about it here, we are keeping tabs on data errors and the NPIA’s and Police Force’s progress in correcting them. We have had some successes – notably with Sussex Police neighbourhood data, neighbhourhood population data (now just 39 out of 5,000 plus rather than 500 with populations of 1 or 0) and Cheshire ASB data – but there is still a long way to go. We need to see a lot more progress on the very incomplete locations of Police Stations across England and Wales. for example. One year on and 5 Police Forces have not seen fit to report these at all – Wiltshire, North Yorkshire, Humberside, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire – and others only partially. We need to know where the Police Stations are so we can start to filter out the distortionary effect of crimes with no location assigned to a Police Station on or near a specific road.

With the impending full calendar year of data, of particular importance for this month’s update are Hertfordshire’s Jan 2011 and Vehicle totals which look transposed. We told the NPIA about this at the beginning of December 2011 and a few times since then. So let’s hope they get it checked and fixed this time.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience everyone, we will have an update with you soon.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Posted: January 18th, malady 2012  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Last week, for the first time, I actually used the QR code (Quick Response) scanner on my Blackberry  and I belatedly realised what a great invention they are. No difficult and long urls – just scan and it takes you straight there and then you can share the QR code by facebook or email. UKCrimeStats has a huge and growing database of monthly information and we’re always trying to make it as accessible as possible. So we’ve decided to experiment and introduce an individual QR code for every single page on the site, right down to the individual crimes like this one, no. 1003 and streets like Oxford Street – QR code below.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

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.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

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.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Posted: December 18th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Last week, the Sunday Times used UKCrimeStats data – all of which in it’s raw form is freely available from Police.uk – to run a news feature entitled Austerity crimewave hits Britain. It was subsequently picked up by a number of other papers and radio stations. For obvious reasons, with a new recession probably on the way and public sector cuts just starting to come through, mostly in local government – many people are keen to see if there is any correlation to the overall crime rate or at least acquisitive crime.

Here’s the data in an open office spreadsheet which was always available free to view from our Police section with a small amount of exporting and formula work which I’ve done for you. There are a number of points that need to be made and have not been yet debated;

1. The Weather: According to a piece in today’s Sunday Sun and quoting UKCrimeStats- “POLICE say people in the North are turning to a life of crime to make “ends meet” after Government cuts” by Michael Brown. As you’ll see from the spreadsheet, the comparison is between monthly December 2010 and October 2011 totals. To paraphrase the article “ . . . these show that  burglary rates were 55.5% higher in Cleveland in October 2011 compared to December last year, while in Northumberland robberies have apparently rocketed”. But “ Northumberland Police assistant chief constable Jim Campbell rejected any comparison as “nonsensical” and blamed snow for the rise. “December 2010 was a month which saw the most severe weather conditions experienced in the north east for a generation,” he said.“The extreme weather conditions lasted throughout the entire month and undoubtedly suppressed crime levels across the entire force area”. 

That would make sense if you were to view Northumbria and Cleveland in isolation. The trouble is that the whole country had bad weather in December 2010, it was a national whiteout.

I do think there is a correlation between bad weather and lower crime and soon we will be overlaying weather data to have a more precise understanding of the correlation. The trouble is, Northumbria’s criticism doesn’t account for other parts of the country – that also had bad weather conditions – showing a marked fall in crime from December 2010. Was there an unknown freak mini-heatwave going on in the areas administered by Gwent Police in Wales and Thames Valley Police which both showed a 19% drop in burglaries? Soon with our weather data, we will be able to look back and know.

2. Month to month comparisons may not be perfect, but they are valid and interesting: I do agree that in the ideal academic world, to smooth out a seasonal variation, one month’s data should only be compared to that of the same month a year earlier. And then truth to tell, I don’t really agree. The Police themselves look at a time series of data, daily, weekly, monthly – with much more temporal granularity. They don’t wait 12 months to find out what’s really going on. Patterns and differences can emerge quite quickly over 43 Police Forces – it only takes 3 data points to see a trend and a fourth to break it, if it even exists.  It is nonetheless a reflection of what’s happening on the ground, across the country between two different time points. If the 43 Police Forces would like to release another 12 months of historical data prior to December 2010, we would be more than happy to upload it to UKCrimeStats.

3. The data should decide the headline, not the other way round: if you look at Cleveland’s page on our site, perhaps the most interesting question is not so much the jump between December 2010 and October 11 which was 55%.

It’s much more about the jump from Dec to January where it has remained remarkably flat – irrespective of the weather. I wonder what it was for November 2010? Media stories about rising crime may pique everyone’s interest more easily, but we should be equally  fascinated in learning where and why it has fallen in other areas at the same time.   There’s a story there too. Were those Forces pursuing different policies or is it something completely unrelated?  As you’ll see from our spreadsheet there is a far from uniform pattern of seasonal variation.

4. The days of the Home Office and Police Forces presenting crime statistics on their own terms with the best possible spin are (nearly) over: the crime data is out there available for everyone to see – it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to interpret it the way you’d like them to. Anyone looking at this site is free to draw their own conclusions based on what range of data they select. We have no control over that.

But let’s be clear – I have great admiration for the Police. Theirs is a very difficult job, damned for being too soft or too hard in a very political environment when most of them probably joined up thinking they were going to just fight crime – not ingratiate themselves with or go up against pressure groups and politicians. And as I have said here before, I reject entirely the idea that crime or the lack of it is 100% linked to Police effectiveness  (although if you read Cost of the Cops by Policy Exchange, there’s obviously much room for improvement). We are a post-religious society, broken in parts that is trying to find a new balance between freedom and responsibility. So I do support the idea of elected Police Commissioners. Not because this may lead necessarily to better policing policies that reduce crime although it probably will in the long run. Moreso because I sense that it is a far better method of getting more of the public to engage with the issues, restore faith in Law and Order and develop a sense for what is achievable and what is not.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post