A major news feature in the Sunday Times today which draws on our increasingly successful platform, ask UKCrimeStats. All the data for the article, patient Austerity Crimewave hits Britain, comes from UKCrimeStats which the EPC owns.
EPC and platform UKCrimeStats in the Sunday Times today
December 11th, 2011UKCrimeStats and crime data in the Sunday Times today
December 11th, 2011Posted: December 11th, store stuff 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
A big news piece today in the Sunday Times today – Austerity crimewave hits Britain – who we worked with to compile the data about the austerity wave of crime across Britain. You may not have immediately realised from the feature article but all the data was compiled by this platform which the Economic Policy Centre owns. The report focuses on burglary and robbery across the different Police Forces between December 2010 and October 2011.
We find increasingly that media sources like the Sunday Times find it much easier to work with UKCrimeStats because we are independent, sickness case transparent and our platform thanks to careful design and database management can give context and meaning to the underlying data.
October 2011 data now live on UKCrimeStats
December 3rd, 2011Posted: December 3rd, unhealthy 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
We now have 11 months of aggregated data on UKCrimeStats – a special thanks again to our Chief Data Architect for working to make this available asap. We have some new upgrades coming through shortly which we’re excited about too – watch this space.
On a separate note – we are aware of – and will always be open about – some errors in the data (which we take from police.uk, unchanged) which have still not being fixed in the latest despite multiple proddings of the NPIA and RKH – amongst the worst is probably Cheshire Police (who we don’t blame) – their ASB figures for the first 3 months – just look at the chart and Sussex neighbourhood totals for December 2010 and January 2011 – still unavailable. We track these and others on the Forum part of our website.
I’ll be adding some more posts on the forum about data I’ve found which look suspect very shortly. Notably;
Lincolnshire Police – March 2011 Robbery and Vehicle totals
Wiltshire Police – March 2011 ASB total
Hertfordshire Constabulary – Jan 2011 ASB total
The original open data philosophy is just get it out there as fast as you can, treatment no matter how flawed it is, with little or no regard to data governance. This is flat wrong. It is as academically misinformed as the “experts” who told us in the early 90s, all that counted regarding privatisation in the ex-Soviet Block was speed and a liberal market economy is just a series of institutions – central bank, regulators, etc. – as if trust and corruption were immaterial. This misconstrued blind faith has in the worst case, arguably turned Russia into a nationalist oligarchy rather than an outwardly open democracy.
We know at UKCrimeStats how expensive and time-consuming it is to clean up the crime data and we don’t receive a penny for it or even a word of thanks. I could understand that in the first couple of months that not everything was right with such a large dataset and have said so frequently. But we’re now 10 months in, they’ve had all the time in the world to sort it out and there are no excuses any more.
Open data from government should not be immune from commercial standards of accuracy – especially if you’re paid by the Home Office allegedly £300k to release it in a format for developers and have now started charging for advice on the api. Beat that for a vertically-integrated conflict of interest.
That’s why I am sceptical about the case for a £10 million Open Data Institute quango when just minor increases in data responsibility, resource and political will could lower the barriers to entry for developers and deliver the £6 billion open data economy (and possibly much more) the likes of Dr Rufus Pollock dreams about.
Men – the real cause of crime?
November 27th, 2011Posted: November 27th, doctor 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
I’m looking forward to talking in a couple of weeks time to some Sociology A-level students about UK crime, crime statistics and a host of related crime issues – one of which was crime related to gender. Do get in touch if you’d like me – Dan Lewis – to talk to you abuut UKCrimeStats, crime issues etc.. I can’t afford to give these talks for free but offer a much reduced and affordable rate for Schools and village societies as well as the angle and insight of an independent.
Anyway, back to the title of the post – if you’re interested in crime and gender relationships, you absolutely have to read this article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Counting the social cost of masculinity by Cynthis Cockburn, an honorary professor in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Warwick University and Ann Oakley, a sociology professor.
Amongst the many factual points they assemble;
“Take the August riots in Britain this year. As the suspects were charged, considerable detail was published by the Ministry of Justice. The press focused on the age, ethnicity, neighbourhood and employment status of offenders. Yet by far the most dramatic divergence the statistics revealed was gender: 92 per cent of the first 466 defendants were male.”
and
“If men committed crimes leading to jail at the rate women do, the government would save about £3.4 billion a year. Zoom out to the overall cost of crime, calculated by the Home Office at £78 billion a year in 2009, including not only criminal justice system costs but lost productivity, service costs, and impact on victims.”
Here at UKCrimeStats – we currently have no data on the criminal and certainly not on their gender. I don’t think there’s much doubt that most crime is committed by men. The trouble is, I don’t think men will ever commit crimes at the rate women do and a male-free society is not really an option. And I’m not wholly convinced that the culture of masculinity (how do you define that?) is the root cause for crime. Moreover, what about the thumping big majority of men who are not criminals but manage to be seemingly masculine?
The authors didn’t seem to have space to say which of “. . . the certain widespread masculine traits and behaviour are dangerous and costly to individuals and society“.
I do much agree though that it is violent crime that is so worrying and there does seem to be an established long-term rise. Measured as a percentage of the total of reported crime, violent crime has been;
2.4% in 1900
1% in 1937
0.9% in 1967
5.6% in 1997
About 10% so far in 2011 – CORRECTION (28/11/2011) – sorry, it worse than I thought as I was including ASB under the crime total which it isn’t. In September 2011, violent crime made up 17.42% of the total of recorded crime.
These first 4 figures come from a quite brilliant book, “The Strange Death of Moral Britain” by Professor Christie Davies that explores how the UK went from being a low crime, highly moral society from the end of the Victorian period to the 1950s to what we have today. I couldn’t give justice to his book here but there really are many factors at play – family breakdown, drug addiction, the death of religion, alcoholism and a major decline in moral habits of orderliness, honesty, duty and loyalty.
The good news is, as a country, we have been here before – the early Victorian period was heavily marred by crime and social breakdown and they managed to put nearly all of these negatives into reverse by the end of the 19th century.
And I for one am young and naive enough to believe it can be done again.
Elected PCCs – a help or hindrance to crimefighting?
November 23rd, 2011Posted: November 23rd, diagnosis ed 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
This is a post I started writing back in June and parked for a bit. Now it’s very much back in the news. And just a couple of days ago, sales the Conservative Party set up this page for potential candidates to apply.
When we set up UKCrimeStats we understood back then that elected Police heads would be held accountable not just at the ballot box but by their relative performance over time according to the crime data. An independent and trusted platform, pharmacy UKCrimeStats would be needed to keep track of their performance as well as provide more incisive analysis and statistics, dig deeper into the data and where necessary, expose the errors – see our new page and spreadsheet and crime data forum – a lot of data still needs cleaning up.
For all that, I’m well aware that one can be a very effective Police Leader in a high crime area, where it is even rising through no fault of their own – correlation is not causation. But I’m disappointed that some Policing traditionalists believe the voting public is quite unable to discern the externalities to local crime trends and is even less capable of making a sensible choice at the polling booth once they were made part of the process.
Anyway, I’m all for lots of open debate on this – your comments as always, are most welcome. What do you think, will PCCs be a help or a hindrance to fighting crime?
What we need to do is move beyond this disappointingly one-sided article in the Western Mail from earlier this year. Here are a couple of points the article faithfully reports without challenge (in italics) and what some of us might have said in rejoinder in bold;
1. Opponents of the UK Government’s flagship plan to scrap police authorities and replace them with elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) last night used the evidence of high crime levels in Gwent to call for a re-think, saying funds for front-line policing would be diverted to pay for expensive elections.
Actually, this is back to front. The whole point of this reform is to create bottom-up political pressure which diverts resources away from bureaucracy to the front line. And according to a Policy Exchange report, The Cost of the Cops – there is quite a lot of bureaucracy. As Police Minister Nick Herbert says here
“I believe that elected police and crime commissioners will have a very strong focus on reducing the burden of bureaucracy and administration in their forces precisely because they will feel pressure from their electorate to ensure that resources are directed to the front line. We are also placing police and crime commissioners under a duty to collaborate and I am sure that they will work together to drive out unnecessary costs from their forces.”
2. . . . there is evidence from other countries like Zimbabwe and China that politicisation of the police has dangerous consequences.
Quite the most preposterous argument I’ve ever heard. Electricity or money don’t work too well in Zimbabwe either, does that mean we shouldn’t have these too?
In Britain, knife crime is much more deadly than gun crime
November 19th, 2011Posted: November 19th, recipe 2011 Author: Dan sales knife crime is much more deadly than gun crime”>No Comments »
Having just learnt of this terrible story – Four Metropolitan Police officers stabbed in London – it took place in this neighbourhood, check I did some research and came across this very informative website, www.knifecrimes.org which I’ve now added to our blogroll. Violent crime as I’ve written here before, is a very broad category that we have to work with on UKCrimeStats with 143 types of offences that can be used to charge a suspect. We now have a new category called Public Disorder and Weapons, with just 1 month of data so far.
Now back to the theme of the post – according to KnifeCrimes, the arresting fact is that in the 9 years to 2005, victims were 4 times more likely to be murdered by knives than by guns – by 2,026 to 601. When you add to that the number of people who are merely injured rather than murdered, one starts to understand why knife crime has been such a priority for Politicians and the Police for some years.
UKCrimeStats now updated for September with new categories
November 6th, 2011Posted: November 6th, unhealthy 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
Ok, ampoule we’ve done it. It took longer than usual because we had new 5 new crime types to build into the database. These are;
- Theft-shoplifting
- Drugs
- Criminal Damage and Arson
- Public Disorder and Weapons
- Theft-Other
As you’ll see from our main chart below, we have added these under the Other category (from whence they came) so you can keep track going backwards. Going forwards, when we have more than 1 month of data, we will split them out and on the reports section too. See our national page here where we have already started doing this.
We have also updated constituency populations to mid-2010 estimates using the latest data released by the Office for National Statistics. IMHO, Constituencies are a much better guide than neighbourhoods to comparing crime in different areas because they generally have similar and larger population samples, the boundaries don’t change (well, not much – every 4-5 years !) and the population data is far more up to date and precisely sourced. I suspect a lot of the neighbourhood population data – where Police Forces have included it and still too many haven’t – may date from as early as the 2001 census. And as I’m sure you appreciate, this is quite a different country today to then. How many people do you think live in the same place they did 10 years ago?
Comments and suggestions always welcome – just email me, Dan Lewis, on crime@economicpolicycentre.com.
Some guiding principles for a successful open data economy
November 1st, 2011For some months now, I’ve been following “open data” on my google alerts and there is a lot going on, even in nations like Kenya. Added to the experience and frustration I’ve gained working on Britain’s second largest public dataset – crime – and working with my excellent Chief Data Architect, I’ve come to realise that for any government, organisation or developer starting out on this journey, there ought to be in place the following principles from the outset – which I’m sorry to say, has not been our experience.
Guiding principles for open data;
- The data released by the government or public sector organisation must be 100% accurate and all fields completed. If it is not, you will raise the barriers to entry for developers who will have to spend their own precious time and money cleaning it up which they will then understandably be reluctant to share with anyone else.
- No new data fields may be added until point 1. is fully complete. If you try to run before you can walk, you and your data will fall over and public confidence in the initiative will quickly ebb.
- The provider of the data must not have a conflict of interest in providing it – i.e. they should not be releasing public data but witholding key information that they hope to make financial gain from nor should they be entitled to run a website that uses the data to advertise their business, nor should they have first sight and use of the data before the development community. Release the data yes – release a competing platform simultaneously with unfair advantages – no.
- There must be from the start an open two-way conversation between data providers and developers. The easiest way to do this is to set up a forum with an ethos of recrimination free information discovery. The much less effective way is to set up a panel of experts who meet every couple of months and have little first hand knowledge of the data.
- Visibly open metrics must be kept on the number of active developers/applications/downloads – what is growing, declining, why?
- Government must take full responsibility for the accuracy of the data it releases. If some of it is found to be wrong, say so and say when it will be fixed. Do not change files and not tell any developers or the general public. They will notice.
- Government, public sector organisations and developers must be quick to be honest and open about any mistakes in data or applications – there will be some, this is part of the learning process. The point is that mistakes get found because it is open but were hidden away when it was closed.
- Establish clear data governance rules from the outset. Central hub collectors of large datasets should not permit spoke feed-in organisations to freely change codes, numbers, files etc. – this has a knock-on effect to developers down the line whose system is then broken and has to be redesigned, again raising the cost of open data development. Data integrity needs to be relied upon. Databases rely on defined rules that are always do this and never do that.
Exclusive from UKCrimeStats – London Constituency Crime League Table
October 20th, 2011Posted: October 20th, treat 2011 Author: Dan No Comments »
We recently gave an exclusive to Planning in London magazine that showed crime and ASB events in London from December 2010 to July 2011. You will not find this anywhere else. Planning in London is the journal of the London Planning and Development Forum and a winning magazine of the year for the International Building Press awards multiple times.
Here’s the pdf of the table with thanks to PiL.
I wanted to do this because planners and their political masters need to think more about the crime and social impact of their cherished plans, not just the environmental one. For a number of years now, sovaldi sale thanks in no small part to regulation, development has all been about increasing urban density on brownfield sites and energy efficiency. This has led to lots of trendy inner city flats and arguably, indirectly to a planning preference for atomising single or low digit person households. The resulting higher population densities almost always leads to more opportunities for crime and general disorder.
Most people would still much rather live in an upstairs/downstairs home, not too close to their neighbours, with family and a garden, no matter how small. I would venture that more of these types of homes would also help lower the crime rate too.
10 reasons why UKCrimeStats is better than Police.uk
April 19th, 2011We can think of many more than 10 reasons but the driving force behind UKCrimeStats was to be able to do some proper analysis of the data of something that comes at great economic cost to the UK, crime. So here goes;
1. We use neighbourhood population data which means we can calculate Crime Rate. Crime rate is important because it takes into account how many people live a given area relative to the amount of crime and so imparts a better idea of risk.
2. Each of the 500,000 crimes per month is given its own id, map and url e.g. http://www.ukcrimestats.com/Street_Crime/1001/
– and you can search by id – try typing in any number 1 1,500,000
3. We can do cumulative analysis over time or in just one month
4. We have a neighbourhood ranking system – future elected Police Commissioners need some kind of metric for voters to hold them to account and this is a good starting point – search for your neighbourhood and see
5. We are open about the shortcomings of the data – see our Problems With The Crime Data page and FAQ – and we correspond with Police Forces when we see problems so that they can be resolved
6. You can advertise on the site according to Neighbourhood or within a certain number of miles within a given postcode – see here
7. You can compare the 43 Police Forces to see which has the highest or lowest crime rate/total crime/type of crime in which month / over the selected months – see here
8. You can export up to 1,000 rows of results to excel as a csv file
9. You can ask nationally across England and Wales which neighbourhoods have the higest/lowest total / crime rate / violent / vehicle / robbery / other / asbo in this month or over these selected months? – see here
10. You can ask nationally across England and Wales which streets have the highest total crime / violent / vehicle / robbery / other / asbo in this month or over these selected months? – see here – (we can’t show lowest until all streets in the UK have had a crime registered on them and with 3 months of data that’s not possible)
I could go on and say that we’re independent and not funded by government. All in all, this is a work in progress with updates and improvements coming through each month. We have also entered the site into the Open Data Challenge competition, so fingers crossed !