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.
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