A good piece in the BBC here recently – Crime figures: Do the police know how much there really is?

I’m always at pains to stress the limitations of crime data when people phone/email me – as they frequently do. I even republished a chapter by Nick Ross, formerly of Crimewatch from his excellent book, Crime: How to solve it – and why so much of we’re told is wrong. By it’s nature crime is secretive and there will always be a gap between actual crime, reported crime and recorded crime.

I have long argued that it is wrong for the Police Forces to be in charge of the collection and collation of crime data and statistics because that is how they are held to account and there is a clear conflict of interest.

A bit like students marking their own exam papers.

There has to be a better way.

For all that, crime data in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – is for researchers, the number one crime dataset in the world. Monthly data from 2011, divided into crime types and fairly closely geospatially located. I would never argue that it’s perfect, but I’m confident that it is the most transparent crime dataset in the world – both in scale and detail.

And something, in this case, a substantial something, is far better than nothing.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2019/04/09/how-much-crime-do-we-actually-know-about/

About once a week, somebody emails me wanting to place an infographic on our website about crime statistics and security solutions to drive traffic to their webiste and push their product at no cost to themselves. Nothing commercially wrong with that. And I would go further, crime preventative measures should in general be much more part of the conversation rather than crime solving. However, we don’t accept inforgraphics because invariably they are not using our data – which we can verify – and basically they want free advertising.

Moreover, often enough, it’s not even relevant – like an infographic on crime data in the USA !

We also have a big responsibility here. Our primary mission is to make clear what the crime data actually shows – warts and all. I will never sugarcoat the gaps and limitations in crime data. And running this website does cost money – developer time, servers, analytical time etc.

We are not paid for by government like www.police.uk (a monopoly a bit like the BBC but with a much larger market share – 95%) or given uncompetitive advantages – first use and discriminatory access to the data.

So we work very hard to differentiate ourselves and offer much more sophtisticated insights, including now on property price, Land Registry corporate ownership data and energy consumption. That’s why need your subscriptions, data purchases and bespoke requirements to keep us going. UKCrimestats.com evolved out of a think tank I launched a decade ago, with the principal aim of closing the gap between policy and knowledge. And with this website, we have come a long way in doing that and want to keep doing so.

If you are someone who wants to buy advertising space on our website, request bespoke data research on something else, please get in touch on crime@economicpolicycentre.com .

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2019/04/04/we-dont-accept-3rd-party-infographics/

So we are excited to tell you about a new feature – taking the Land Registry data – approximately 3.5 million pieces of land/building owned by a UK or offshore corporation, we have geospatially matched all of them to all of the subdivisions, postcode sectors/districts and of course postcode.

What this means is you can ask the query between (starting from) January 1864 and the latest date, in a specific area which company purchased the most?

You can also search for properties held by the Corporation name or just by postcode – show me which company owns property in this postcode. It is an invaluable tool for quick information on an area.

You just need to subscribe to access this – just click on Corporate from the menu above between Fusion and Energy.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2019/03/08/new-search-corporate-ownership-of-property-across-the-country/

Using our new feature, see “Corporate” on the menu above, you can now find out exactly which corporations own what where. An invaluable tool. So I thought you may be interested to know who the top 10 owners were by the number of properties;

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2019/03/08/the-top-10-largest-owners-of-property-titles-in-england-and-wales/

I don’t bite !

We just had an example where I wish people would get in touch more quickly. Our fault, a bug. We discovered that there was a short while when new Paypal subscribers were not being written to our membership database – so they were not able to access UKCrimeStats as subscribers. Only one of them told me which is why I didn’t immediately realise what was going on. Everyone of those have now got access. Those who cancelled have had a full refund and 3 months free membership. I have written to all parties concerned.

We have also recently renewed our SSL certificate and all www.ukcrimestats.com addresses start with https which means that you see the green padlock sign next to it and that it is secure.

Always, always feel free to get in touch direct with me on dan@economicpolicycentre.com or on 07900 245 306 if you have any problems or questions.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2019/01/28/any-problems-questions-always-get-in-touch/

London Metropolitan Police have included September this time, so a 2 month update for them. Cheshire Constabulary still has no ASB data – 6 months running – and Gwent is missing burglary. Their ASB count is also lower than it should be.

Something has happened in the last couple of years. It now seems routine and acceptable each month for a at least a couple of the Police Forces to report data that is obviously wrong. I have written to the Home Office in the past to no effect. Better now to write to the relevant Commissioners.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2018/12/08/crime-updated-to-october/

We are currently updating crime – and in the case of the London Metropolitan Police, September as well. Will be live shortly.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2018/12/06/property-prices-now-up-to-october/

An interesting question just put to me by somebody by email, do we have it and which day is more likely to have what kind of crime?

But we don’t have it, all crime data is timestamped by month and year only, for Home Office reasons of data anonymity.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2018/12/04/crime-by-the-day-of-the-week/

Obviously as a crime data site handling payment, you have to be an example. It was however recently pointed out to us that we were not. Basically, images uploaded via wordpress must have an https link otherwise the whole page is deemed to be insecure. This has now been fixed. But you will see that all of our pages are now https and show up as having the padlock sign in the url display of your browser which is more than having an SSL certificate (which we do – GoDaddy).

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2018/11/20/for-your-protection-ukcrimestats-is-a-secure-https-site/

You should know that as with every month, there are a few Forces that have either not updated on time or are incomplete. These are;

Metropolitan Police Force – no September data at all

Cheshire Constabulary – no ASB incidents for September (or indeed since February – pretty unlikely)

Bedfordshire Police – missing August and July

Cambridgshire Constabulary – still missing May, June, July, August

Thames Valley Police – have only reported ASB incidents but no crimes at all for September

We will keep going back and checking for updates every month. However the Home Office really needs to up their game in getting Police Forces to report in time – which they always used to.

Article source: http://ukcrimestats.com/blog/2018/11/09/crime-now-updated-to-september-2018-but/