Tuesday, 1 February 2011

Hours of fun

Type in a postcode at www.police.uk.

9 comments:

formertory said...

Humphreys was being scathing about this a few minutes ago on the Toady programme. Whether wilfully or not, refusing to see the argument that information in the hands of the public is as good a away as any of keeping the police on their toes. If anything can.

Anonymous said...

Hours of 404: Not Found more like!

Umbongo said...

Unfortunately, we are informed that "there has been an error with the website and we're currently looking into it"

Indeed, our police are wonderful!

Rational Anarchist said...

if you're in London, try http://maps.met.police.uk/

seems to have the same data, but actually works.

I'm a little worried about my area: Crimes 155. Rate 104.10.

My sub-ward is bright red. Just a couple of streets over is yellow, with Crimes 10, Rate 6.72. So is my street really 15.5 times more crime-ridden?

Mark Wadsworth said...

FT, Humph was in a particularly foul mood this morning.

Anon, U, it's a bit overloaded today because the novelty hasn't worn off yet.

RA, is 104.1 a relative or an absolute figure, and if so, is that better or worse than average?

Rational Anarchist said...

The crimes figure is absolute, the rate is relative (crimes per 1000 people [per year, presumably], if I'm reading it right).

The neighbouring area is listed as average (meaning within one standard deviation of average) with 6.72, so 104.1 is way above average.

I'm guessing that it's because we have a big road full of pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops in our area - but it still seems rather high.

Rational Anarchist said...

Slightly more information from poking around on the site:

The overall average rate for London is 8.24

The average rate for Croydon (where I am) is 7.18

Breaking it down further, the average rate in my ward (Fairfield) is 22.51

So my sub-ward at 104.10 is very much above average.

They give something of a breakdown of what sort of crimes they were. Almost a third of the crimes in my sub-ward were "Violence against the person".

By contrast, the sub-ward with the lowest rate (in the same ward as me) had just 2 crimes, a rate of 1.28 (and both were theft from a motor vehicle).

Interesting stuff

CFD Ed said...

Some of us did it at work and we were all "average" no matter if there were 2 anit social offences or 200 burglaries and car thefts.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RA, that sort of contradicts what Phil A says.

PA, that is genius. Maybe what 'average' means is 'average for your area'? So crime in a high crime area is average for the amount of crime in a high crime area?