Police's crime maps have their place | Editorial

The hugely popular new crime-mapping website will help inform decisions and engage citizens

So many people logged on to the new police crime-mapping website for England and Wales yesterday that the site remained crashed for much of the day. The benign interpretation of the site's first-day popularity is that this sort of thing always happens when a new and informative website is launched and that in days to come the site will settle down to become a useful tool for policing. A more malign one is that the public's interest in the site reflects not just an understandable curiosity about local crime patterns but also high levels of active fear of crime, which the publication of the maps may encourage, albeit unintentionally.

Some other problems about crime-mapping were instantly apparent. It is a reasonable assumption that most of those who crashed the site were computer literate and able to read maps. Yet, as ever, the significant minority who are neither of these things are likely to be most at risk of many crimes and least likely to engage proactively with the crime-map information. Moreover, because the police are rightly wary of supplying the precise locations of crime reports, the maps use markers which are arbitrarily placed in the general vicinity of the crimes to which they refer. That can lead, as happened yesterday, to an apparently unremarkable small street in Preston being briefly branded as the most crime-ridden place in the country, when it is no such thing.

Just a teething-trouble silly story for the new system? Hopefully so. Yet what if house insurers were now to use such imprecise material to calculate their premiums? Or if homeowners discovered that house prices in their street have collapsed because of an undeserved reputation as a bu! rglary o r violent crime hotspot? There is a danger that crime-mapping will assist the advantaged to address their own neighbourhood problems while adding burdens to those who remain most in need. These are concerns that must be addressed.

When safeguards are in place, however, crime maps can be a useful resource for citizens and policymakers as well as for police. The report on the trialling of the new system showed that the public find the maps helpful and trustworthy. The claim that sharing information would raise fear levels was shown to be a myth, while the public's involvement enabled many improvements to be made to the original proposal. Crime-mapping is not a magic wand, but it helps to inform the public, to facilitate better local decision-making and to engage citizens in more rational strategies for dealing with important problems that can arouse strong emotions. These are all desirable outcomes. The government deserves credit for trusting the public to do the right thing.


guardian.co.uk Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UK greenhouse gas emissions fall 8.7%

Image
Total UK emissions plummet as recession lowers electricity and fuel use A dramatic fall in greenhouse gas emissions following the recession has brought the UK's climate change targets for the next five years within easy reach, taking the pressure off government and business to comply. Government estimates released on Tuesday showed greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8.7% from 2008 to 2009, the biggest drop since records began in 1990. Carbon dioxide levels plunged 9.8%, a fall only matched in 1980, in records extending to 1970. The unexpectedly deep slump in emissions mirrors the fall in industrial output in the recession, with high-emitting sectors including construction and transport hit particularly hard. But it also means that government-set climate change targets of cutting emissions by 35% by 2020, compared with 1990 levels, now look much easier to meet. The UK has already met the targets for 2016, provided emissions stay at 2009 levels. This raises the prospect that business...
Keep reading

Top flyer boo-boo : Shut off noisy engines

LONDON: It's too noisy, could you please turn off the engines ? Could you please open the window? These are some of the "foolish" and "bizarre requests" flyers often make to flight attendants, according to a new survey. The survey of some 3,000 Virgin Atlantic cabin crew members found that some passengers fail to understand why they are prevented from opening the window, others think "turning down" the engines could reduce the noise. "Please, can you open the window?" was among the most common unusual queries made by uncomfortable passengers who seem to be unaware of the benefits of a pressurised cabin at 35,000ft. Other unique questions included "could you turn the engines down because they are too noisy?" and "please can the captain stop the turbulence?", the Telegraph reported. The survey also laid bare the level of comfort and service some customers expect, with several asking flight attendants "can you sho...
Keep reading

Dogs can be trained to sniff out bowel cancer, Japanese researchers say

Image
Experiments show that labrador retriever's sense of smell can identify minute traces of chemicals circulating in human body Dogs can be trained to sniff out bowel cancer, even when the disease is in its early stages, researchers in Japan claim. In a series of experiments that involved sniffing the breath or stool samples of patients, a specially-trained labrador retriever proved nearly as good at identifying those with cancer as a conventional colonoscopy examination. The team, led by Hideto Sonoda at Fukuoka dental college hospital, said some dogs have such a keen sense of smell that they can detect minute traces of chemicals that appear to circulate in the bodies of people who have cancer. The finding builds on previous experiments in which researchers used dogs to sniff out cancers in the skin, lungs, bladder and ovaries. Writing in the journal Gut , the researchers describe how the eight-year-old dog was trained to distinguish between the smell of a patient with colorectal canc...
Keep reading