We don’t hang around on UKCrimeStats – police.uk finally released the data on the 2nd May and we have updated our website now. There were 27,000 new locations – of which more later.

The main point is the clear seasonal impact of good weather for March 2012 – lots of sunshine, less rain and hotter temperatures – as is made clear in this brief BBC report. Usually, this leads to a rise in opportunities for crime and higher crime rates. So there’s a sizeable increase on February 2011. However, measured to the previous March in 2011 (with a subscription you can see all the data from December 2011), you’ll see a significant drop at a national level.

For next month, we’re probably going to flip the other way. We have after all endured the wettest April for 100 years – so a substantial fall in crime from March to April 2012 is in the offing.

For all that, the relationship between weather and crime is sometimes overplayed and it is certainly not unicausal – as I wrote here some months ago – you can’t always blame crime on the weather.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/05/04/ukcrimestats-now-updated-for-march-2012-great-weather-higher-crime/

Last March 13th, I gave a presentation to the above panel about the issues we were experiencing with crime data provision – so for your interest here it is. I’m still waiting to see the minutes of that meeting which are still not posted up on the data.gov.uk website – well nobody said government was fast !

In the meantime, police.uk finally got round to releasing the March 2012 figures yesterday evening 6 days late – with no ready explanation for developers as usual. We are working on the update now and will have it ready for you in a few days. What I can reveal is that we are showing a total of 538,534 crimes and ASB incidents for March 2012 compared to 463,241 for February.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/05/02/my-memo-to-the-crime-and-justice-transparency-sector-panel/

They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery.  So I was mildly amused today to pick up the Evening Standard to find that Boris Johnson’s crime manifesto today pledged to do something we already offer for free !

According to the Evening Standard in the Crime Fighting part of Boris Johnson’s overall plan, he would “Publish monthly crime figures and police numbers for every borough“. Well, you can see monthly crime numbers by borough here and if they do go ahead and publish Borough Force numbers on a monthly basis, we could put that in easily too. Let’s hope they don’t do down the road of yet another tax-funded website like police.uk.

Another part of the manifesto that did concern me was the pledge to “Develop (a) smartphone crime reporting app“. Why would they spend taxpayers money developing that when they could release the data and developers could not only compete with each other to do a better job, but do it for free at no cost to the taxpayer?

I’m all for our politicians taking an open-minded closer look at what technology can do against crime and inefficiency. But I’d rather not have to keep pointing out that the role of government is to release the data, not develop it and crowd out private sector job creation and tax revenue.

Meanwhile, unless I’m mistaken, Ken Livingstone’s programme meanwhile appears to be devoid of any technology solution.

So on this admittedly very narrow point, I’m not sure who’s better or worse !

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/04/02/tell-boris-johnson-london-borough-crime-totals-are-already-on-ukcrimestats/