Abstract
In 2011 the Home Office released the police.uk website, which provided a high‐resolution map of recent crime data for the national extents of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Through this free service, crimes were represented as points plotted on top of a Google map, visible down to a street level of resolution. However, in order to maintain confidentiality and to comply with data disclosure legislation, individual‐level crimes were aggregated into points that represented clusters of events that were located over a series of streets. However, with aggregation the representation of crimes as points becomes problematic, engendering spurious precision over where crimes occurred. Given obvious public sensitivity to such information, there are social imperatives for appropriate representation of crime data, and as such, in this paper we present a method of translating the ‘point’ crime events into a new representational form that is tied to street network geography; presenting these results in an alternate national crime mapping portal http://www.policestreets.co.uk.
Highlights
The ‘street-level’ mapping on the police.uk website was launched by the Home Office in 2011 to provide a public portal for high-resolution spatial data pertaining to occurrences of recorded crime
The imperative of resolving these issues was further amplified by the 2008 Policing Green Paper, which mandated that all police forces would be required to publish crime maps for their localities (Home Office 2008), a point later clarified as being required at ‘street level’ (Home Office 2010)
The concern of this paper is not to replicate such discussions about the purpose, merit and ethical constraints of online crime mapping, which are adequately explored in the literature elsewhere (Weisburd et al 2009; Chainey and Tompson 2012); instead we present a critique of how the police.uk website translates geographic data about crimes into information, and outlines a potential solution to mitigate some of the issues we identify
Summary
The ‘street-level’ mapping on the police.uk website was launched by the Home Office in 2011 to provide a public portal for high-resolution spatial data pertaining to occurrences of recorded crime. These data were consolidated from across different Police Force areas and were presented both as areal aggregates for a zonal geography and as ‘street-level’ point data. The concern of this paper is not to replicate such discussions about the purpose, merit and ethical constraints of online crime mapping, which are adequately explored in the literature elsewhere (Weisburd et al 2009; Chainey and Tompson 2012); instead we present a critique of how the police.uk website translates geographic data about crimes into information, and outlines a potential solution to mitigate some of the issues we identify.
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