UKCrimeStats goes down because of . . . crime !

April 18th, 2011

It’s quite an irony that all phone and internet lines near our datacentre went down for a few days from last Friday mid-afternoon until this morning because of the theft of 1,000 pairs of cable !

So we had no way of getting our website UKCrimeStats back online again which is incredibly annoying in the early days of any website. And my initial anger with BT turned to some sympathy when I found out why this had happened.

Cable theft is a growing problem and the root cause it would seem – other than dishonesty – has to be the pretty spectacular recovery of copper prices since 2008, now near recent highs.

For all that, I find it quite incredible that this actually happened in broad daylight of the time of my cut-off was anything to go by. Cable theft is apparently costing the UK £770m a year – but that doesn’t include the lost time and opportunities to those dependent on broadband and telecom services.

DECODING THE CRIME DATA IN ENGLAND AND WALES: DEC 2010 – FEB 2011

April 15th, 2011

We now have the first three months of data uploaded on www.ukcrimestats.com and I realise that not everyone has the patience to work their way through a lot of tables to get the big picture. So that’s why we produced this first report which contains the top 10 results for the different combinations over the first quarter of data. For more results than the top 10, go to the website and export up to 1,000 results to Excel. UKCrimeStats is the only website that can give you this kind of cumulative analysis.

Decoding the Crime Data: Dec 2010 - Feb 2011And here are the contents;

Key Findings

Police Forces

Table 1: The 10 Highest Total Crime Rate Police Forces

Table 2: The 10 Lowest Total Crime Rate Police Forces

Neighbourhoods

Table 3: The 10 Highest Total Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 4: The 10 Highest Total Crime Rate Neigbourhoods

Table 5: The 10 Highest Total Violent Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 6: The 10 Highest Violent Crime Rate Neighbourhoods

Table 7: The 10 Highest Total Vehicle Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 8: The 10 Highest Vehicle Crime Rate Neighbourhoods

Table 9: The 10 Highest Total Robbery Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 10: The 10 Highest Robbery Crime Rate Neighbourhoods

Table 11: The 10 Highest Total Other Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 12: The 10 Highest Other Crime Rate Neighbourhoods

Table 13: The 10 Highest Total Burglary Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 14: The 10 Highest Burglary Crime Rate Neighbourhoods

Table 15: The 10 Highest Total Anti-social behaviour Crime Neighbourhoods

Table 16: The 10 Highest Anti-social behaviour crime rate Neighbourhoods

Streets

Table 17: The 10 Highest Total Crime Streets

Table 18: The 10 Highest Violent Crime Streets

Table 18: The 10 Highest Vehicle Crime Streets

Table 19: The 10 Highest Robbery Crime Streets

Table 20: The 10 Highest Other Crime Streets

Table 21: The 10 Highest Burglary Crime Streets

Table 22: The 10 Highest Anti-social behaviour Crime Streets

Policy Recommendations

Annex: Problems with the data

One of the things we’ve been very careful to be is open about the shortcomings of the data. Some of the results look wrong – but this is the official police data and that is what the site reflects. Here’s one finding we have flagged up on our FAQ page, appended below;

“Why is Great Moor Street in Bolton the highest violent crime on or near street in England and Wales?

The official data feed from www.police.uk belonging to Greater Manchester Police says it is. If you’d like to check, please download the official file http://crimemapper2.s3.amazonaws.com/frontend/crime-data/2011-02/2011-02-greater-manchester-street.zip . The problem appears to be the accompanying sentence to nearly every crime on or near Great Moor Street which says “CrimeMapper has moved this record to a location that is the system’s nearest available street to the centre of the policing foot-beat where the record was originally plotted”.

We don’t know why they’ve done that, perhaps the location records were lost?

It has skewed the results but we can’t guess which street each of these crimes were on and this website only reflects the official police data. And to remove the crimes on the street from the database would be a distortion as well. If it changes, we will change it too. But this is in the hands of the police and their data record-keeping.”

For all that, we are confident that UKCrimeStats is by far and away the most accurate, open and analytical website for looking at the crime data in the UK. And as the monthly data continues to accumulate and the Police and RKH get better at improving its quality, UKCrimeStats will be able to give an even more precise picture of what’s going on.