A WORLD-FIRST website mapping crime in Britain, street by street, had a difficult first day, crashing repeatedly in face of 18 million hits a minute at one point and criticised for wrongly declaring some areas to be crime “hotspots”.
The Home Office-funded police.uk website was out of action for much of yesterday in the face of demand, which took even its strongest supporters by surprise, but they insist it will be up and running shortly and will change the relationship between police and public forever.
Home secretary Theresa May said it would put unprecedented power into the hands of local communities to question police commanders, but auctioneers fretted that it could send prices in some districts into a tail-spin.
A junior Home Office minister, Nick Herbert, denied the auctioneers’ claims, saying: “That can’t be a reason not to tell the public what is happening. Crime cannot be swept under the carpet.”
However, it is accepted that the website, when established long enough to reflect trends, will affect home insurance premiums.
Besides crashing in the face of demand, there are, however, clear software problems that will take longer to eradicate, since the site is logging some 999 calls to the station they were received, rather than from the caller location.
The flaw has thrown up some bizarre results. Two streets in Sussex were listed as third and 12th in the crime rankings, but later it was discovered that two Sussex Constabulary 999 call centres are located there.
“We have been thorough in our recording and these high figures relate to hoax calls – mainly received by mobile phone – which have been recorded at those sites because there was no alternative geographical location,” a Sussex police spokesman said.
The monthly publication of crime data is but the start of a new era, since Thames Valley Police is to produce a separate website showing the pattern of anti-social behaviour in its district, while Hampshire plans a daily bulletin.
Two more police forces Lincolnshire and West Yorkshire are considering publishing information about convicted offenders, along with a list of their crimes. Surrey is developing a mobile telephone mapping app.
Quarterly crime statistics have been available online in Britain, but not in Northern Ireland, for some time, but the Home Office project, which has cost just £300,000 so far, breaks the information down by street by street and by six categories of crime.
