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BAC: Home of cutting edge theatre. And police meetings.

AMENDMENT: I was trying to be informative, but I was misinformed (or possibly just incompetent)! The meeting is tonight at 7pm, but at the Devas Club on Stormont Road, although I don’t have a nice image of that.

The Shaftesbury Safer Neighbourhood Team hold their regular public meeting this evening.

Starting at 7pm in Battersea Arts Centre it’s a chance to talk to your local police team and find out what they are doing to make Shaftesbury ward safer. You can also find out what crime is like in the area from the national police crime maps.

Unfortunately I won’t be there (I’ll be somewhere between Wales and London, hopefully closer to the latter) but my ward colleague Jonathan Cook does plan to attend, so can help with council related matters.

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The new crime mapping system: burglaries around Lavender Hill police station

After all the fuss about my old crime maps and the crime briefing the council would send out to Neighbourhood Watch coordinators the government are the ones to ride in and save the day with their new crime mapping system.

You can read about the sad history of my crime maps in a post I published at the time, but the short story is that after 18 months of publishing them a complaint from Harrow Council brought them, and the council briefings I used to create them, to an end.

This was annoying, not least because we knew that pretty much every other council continued (and continues) to produce the same sort of crime briefing to inform their Neighbourhood Watch coordinators. But having been identified, we had to stop. This was, and continues to be, an incredibly sore point for many people who valued the regular briefing.

But now the government has come good on its commitment to providing ‘street level’ information on crime. I first heard that publication was imminent a few weeks ago, and was surprised when I was told how they would work, mainly because the Information Commissioner has been so insistent that this sort of mapping isn’t acceptable.

The new mapping site follows almost the same methodology as my maps did, using the central point for a road to spot map crime. But it has a lot more information than mine did, mapping anti-social behaviour, robbery, burglary, vehicle crime, violent crime and a generic category for all other crime. I’m convinced these work well in informing the public. In most cases, I suspect people will be surprised at how low crime is: when I was producing my maps people just assumed crime rates were much higher. But they are a valuable took which enable people to hold the relevant authorities to account.

I’d love to know what you think of them, but most of all I would love to know what the Information Commissioner thinks about it!

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Violence against the person: Purple (and then blue) are worse, on the left is a map for midnight to 4am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. A map for the rest of the week is on the right.

If it’s possible to fall in love with a website I think I am. These maps come from the SaferView blog (where you can see the full map, rather than my cheeky cut outs), a site I regularly visit and commend.

What is shows may strike many as blindingly obvious, but it shows it remarkably clearly.

Basically colours represent the level of violence against the person, based on their deviation from the average. The palest is below average, orange is average (or within 0.5 standard deviations) and purple and blue both above average (0.5-1.5 and more than 1.5 standard deviations above average respectively).

So, on the left, late on Friday and Saturday nights the biggest problems are exactly where you would expect them. Clockwise from top-left you have the wards containing Putney High Street then Clapham Junction Northcote Road and Battersea Rise then Tooting Broadway.

Only Tooting remains above average when you look at violence against the person for the rest of the week. But what is telling are the wards that move the wrong way, going from average to above average. Roehampton, Latchmere, Queenstown and Graveney move from average to above average. (Conversely West Putney, East Putney, Balham and Bedford all move from average to below average.) If you overlaid a map of relative prosperity and deprivation there would be a close match.

Violence against the person covers a range of offences and there’s no indication of which are involved here, although I would bet alcohol is involved in many, particularly those late night ones.

It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t a map of volume of crime (which in this case is relatively low) and repeat my mantra that Wandsworth has the lowest crime rate in inner London.

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Crime on the borders: A murder map including the northern border of Wandsworth and Lambeth appears to show you are safer in Wandsworth.

I’m not allowed to map crimes, but others are still doing some interesting things. The Londonist highlighted a fascinating Murder Map of the capital.

The details seem to be taken from court reports, although the site itself is vague on the subject it has the appearance of being ancillary to a court reporting website CourtNewsUK. Personally I’d like to see a bit more transparency on that front.

However, the maps themselves are fascinating and an example of what can be done when information is free (although in this case I suspect the information, while free, wasn’t open and needed some resource to compile and collate). The data they created don’t seem to be available anywhere either, which is a shame.

Seeing the map resonated with a recent post on the SaferView blog about murder maps. That post was positive about them as a tool:

They are simple, straight forward and easy to interpret. They are the quickest way to understand where the safer and less safe neighbourhoods are in major towns.

I am a bit more sceptical. Murder is an unusual crime. Reading through the crime reports on the Murder Maps site it’s clear that the majority involve a victim and perpetrator who are known to each other, sometimes as family, sometimes through other criminal connections. Murder is not something that most people need ever fear.

However, looking at the map it would seem that there is a correlation between murder and other crime, which is quite interesting given the often very different motivations, victims and perpetrators. This is possibly an obvious conclusion, murder may ‘follow’ other crime, for example, you can’t really have a drug related murder unless there’s a drugs market in that area. Or it might be related to socio-economic factors, meaning that the same areas that are prone to high crime will also be prone to murder. There certainly seems to be a strong link between areas deprivation, affluence and murders on the map.

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After over 18 months I’ve been told by the Metropolitan Police to stop producing my crime maps.

I was told by a slightly convoluted route (I understand a complaint by Harrow Council prompted a chain of communication that hopped along at least three intermediaries to me) but I understand that the Met’s issues are mainly over privacy – that victims can be identified by a combination of road and crime – but also that they would increase fear of crime and that detailing the methods meant criminals could use my site to learn new ways of committing crime.

While I disagree I’m obviously not going to continue having been told to stop by the police.

And if I’m honest, I’m not that unhappy. They took a little time to produce and the policing white paper has a commitment to “street level” crime information by February of next year, so it’s not as if this sort of information isn’t coming around the corner anyway.

What’s more, while I have been producing them huge amounts of data have been made available in open formats that just weren’t there at the beginning of 2009. The London Data Store being a prime example, and just looking at the crime and community safety category immediately reveals some interesting looking datasets. I’m looking forward to being able to use the time to start looking at those and, perhaps, sharing some amateurish analysis on the blog.

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The map below details crimes reported in Wandsworth between 5 – 12 August 2010, it features a total of 75 crimes (down five from the previous week).

If you have any information on any of these crimes you can get in touch with the local police on 020 7350 1122 or via Crimestoppers (anonymously, if you wish) on 0800 555 111, you may be eligible for a reward if your information leads to an arrest.

You can click on the individual markers for more information.


View Wandsworth Crime Briefing for 5 – 12 August 2010 in a larger map

In an emergency you should always call 999, but don’t forget that in non-emergency cases you can call the police on 0300 123 1212 or report crime via online.met.police.uk

  1. Yellow flags represent burglaries and red flags represent street crime.
  2. The briefing only contains details of burglaries and robberies. Other crimes are not included.
  3. You can see more detail by following the link to the Google website.
  4. The flags are not placed precisely (it would be irresponsible to advertise victims of burglary) but instead are spaced roughly equally on the roads they took place. The idea is to give a visual representation of the spread and range of crime in Wandsworth, rather than pinpointing crime locations.
  5. While I try to ensure the data are accurate it is reliant on the information I receive, and I’m only human, so it may be mistakes have crept in. Please let me know if you think you’ve spotted one.
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The map below details crimes reported in Wandsworth between 29 July – 5 August 2010, it features a total of 80 crimes (down seven from the previous week).

There is a link between transport and crime, and what’s quite interesting about this map – whether coincidence or not – is how it appears to follow main roads.

If you have any information on any of these crimes you can get in touch with the local police on 020 7350 1122 or via Crimestoppers (anonymously, if you wish) on 0800 555 111, you may be eligible for a reward if your information leads to an arrest.

You can click on the individual markers for more information.


View Wandsworth Crime Briefing for 29 July – 5 August 2010 in a larger map

In an emergency you should always call 999, but don’t forget that in non-emergency cases you can call the police on 0300 123 1212 or report crime via online.met.police.uk

  1. Yellow flags represent burglaries and red flags represent street crime.
  2. The briefing only contains details of burglaries and robberies. Other crimes are not included.
  3. You can see more detail by following the link to the Google website.
  4. The flags are not placed precisely (it would be irresponsible to advertise victims of burglary) but instead are spaced roughly equally on the roads they took place. The idea is to give a visual representation of the spread and range of crime in Wandsworth, rather than pinpointing crime locations.
  5. While I try to ensure the data are accurate it is reliant on the information I receive, and I’m only human, so it may be mistakes have crept in. Please let me know if you think you’ve spotted one.
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It is a while since I droned on about crime mapping, but came across an interesting blog by a PhD student (who happens to be a retired police officer).

The site has a fairly lengthy post (actually a republishing of a paper) covering some of the problems with mapping, as well as some potential future uses.

I’ll say from the outset that I’m a fan of point mapping. While I accept some of the criticisms made in the paper about point mapping I’m a firm believer that we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good; just because we cannot create an ‘ideal’ map doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

But one point with which I wholeheartedly agree is that the current set of maps available do little to offer any reassurance.

The Met’s maps, for example, consistently report most of London having average crime. Currently it suggests 29 out of 32 London boroughs have average crime, with Westminster having above average and Richmond and Bexley below average. Nowhere appears as a high or low crime area. (When you zoom in closer every single Wandsworth ward also has average crime.)

While there is, I know, some statistical justification for that, it immediately seems nonsensical. People ‘think’ some areas are high crime and some areas are low crime. When the official maps so blatantly contradict this belief by suggesting everywhere is ‘average’ it immediately reduces their perceived value and, I would suggest, the degree of trust placed in them.

This is not to say that I believe my maps are faultless, I know they have their flaws. However, I believe that by providing the fairly raw information, like the type and approximate location of a crime, residents can make a better assessment of whether crime is high or low.

In other words it better serves the purpose of either reassuring people crime isn’t that high, or giving the information needed to challenge the police, council and other partners if they believe crime is too high.

But it is incredibly difficult to develop further. I would love, for example, to do punishment maps: detailing crimes that had seen someone caught and prosecuted. Again, this serves the purpose of reassurance (where people are caught and punished) and allowing people to hold the criminal justice system to account (where no-one is caught and punished).

But if the information on sentencing is publicly available I can’t find it. Indeed I find it slightly worrying that South Western Magistrates are busy just a few hundred metres from me but that it’s almost impossible for me to find out what they have done.

The Saferview paper also raises the idea of publishing the routes taken of police cars and beats. A fascinating idea, since it would be an easy way of refuting, or proving, the ‘police never come down my street’ argument. Although the data would need significant cleaning, since timed GPS data would give away specific addresses the police visit, it could potentially be an incredibly reassuring dataset to publish. (Or perhaps not, if it turns out that the dots never really move from the stations.)

But it occurred to me when thinking about these is that the key principle is, really, about freedom of information. It’s essentially saying that information is not ‘owned’ by the police, the council, the government, or anyone else except as a custodian on behalf of the public and, therefore, the public have the right to see it since it reflects what is happening to the public and what is done on behalf of the public.

The key is not whether there is any use for the public in having access to the information, that is irrelevant, it’s whether there is any compelling reason the public shouldn’t have access. What astounds me is not that these ideas are starting to come out, it’s that we are only just starting to talk about these things.

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The map below details crimes reported in Wandsworth between 22-29 July 2010, it features a total of 87 crimes (up six from the previous week).

If you have any information on any of these crimes you can get in touch with the local police on 020 7350 1122 or via Crimestoppers (anonymously, if you wish) on 0800 555 111, you may be eligible for a reward if your information leads to an arrest.

You can click on the individual markers for more information.


View Wandsworth Crime Briefing for 22-29 July 2010 in a larger map

In an emergency you should always call 999, but don’t forget that in non-emergency cases you can call the police on 0300 123 1212 or report crime via online.met.police.uk

  1. Yellow flags represent burglaries and red flags represent street crime.
  2. The briefing only contains details of burglaries and robberies. Other crimes are not included.
  3. You can see more detail by following the link to the Google website.
  4. The flags are not placed precisely (it would be irresponsible to advertise victims of burglary) but instead are spaced roughly equally on the roads they took place. The idea is to give a visual representation of the spread and range of crime in Wandsworth, rather than pinpointing crime locations.
  5. While I try to ensure the data are accurate it is reliant on the information I receive, and I’m only human, so it may be mistakes have crept in. Please let me know if you think you’ve spotted one.
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The map below details crimes reported in Wandsworth between 15-22 July 2010, it features a total of 81 crimes (exactly the same total as last week). Latchmere ward, normally one of the higher crime areas had no crime featured.

If you have any information on any of these crimes you can get in touch with the local police on 020 7350 1122 or via Crimestoppers (anonymously, if you wish) on 0800 555 111, you may be eligible for a reward if your information leads to an arrest.

You can click on the individual markers for more information.


View Wandsworth Crime Briefing for 15-22 July 2010 in a larger map

In an emergency you should always call 999, but don’t forget that in non-emergency cases you can call the police on 0300 123 1212 or report crime via online.met.police.uk

  1. Yellow flags represent burglaries and red flags represent street crime.
  2. The briefing only contains details of burglaries and robberies. Other crimes are not included.
  3. You can see more detail by following the link to the Google website.
  4. The flags are not placed precisely (it would be irresponsible to advertise victims of burglary) but instead are spaced roughly equally on the roads they took place. The idea is to give a visual representation of the spread and range of crime in Wandsworth, rather than pinpointing crime locations.
  5. While I try to ensure the data are accurate it is reliant on the information I receive, and I’m only human, so it may be mistakes have crept in. Please let me know if you think you’ve spotted one.