Crime mapping - overlaying the sites and times of crimes onto maps - turned out to be one of the crux topics where it became clear that the Free Our Data campaign was actually getting some traction.
First, the two parties vied with each other to push it - in mid-2008 Boris Johnson said he'd introduce it if elected mayor (he was, he did) but not to be outdone, the then home secretary Jacqui Smith mandated crime mapping by all police forces by the end of December 2008. They did.
However, those implementations weren't very satisfactory (despite what ministers might tell you) because they were limited in how much they could tell you. And you also couldn't plot the raw data yourself; you were presented with the maps.
Now, however, there is going to be a crime mapping API - meaning that developers can plot them onto maps of their own choosing, and in their own way.
The API is at http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/, and explains itself simply enough:
"The Police API allows you to retrieve information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces. All forces are required to keep this data accurate and up to date, so the API provides a rich and definitive data source for information such as Neighbourhood team members; Upcoming events; Crime levels & statistics; Nearest police stations"
The API is implemented as a standard XML REST web service using HTTP GET/POST requests - which means that it should be easy for developers to create mashups quickly.
There are also code examples provided (so if you want to report a crime around the Guardian's offices - against the English language, perhaps - you'd use some generated by this query). API requests are limited to 500 per day.
You can pull out crime data for a specific area via http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/crime-area/. In fact, as one of the developers points out, "The data available via the API covers almost everything you can access via CrimeMapper."
Which has good and bad points. Good, in that you can overlay it onto maps you choose yourself - perhaps the Ordnance Survey's Openspace API (which gives lovely OS maps down to surprisingly large scales), or OpenStreetMap, or even UKMap (if you're using it, which we hear the Land Registry might - at least to accept property details).
Bad, though, in that you still don't get any useful detail. Crimes often aren't actually assigned to real locations; they're made vague. Sometimes you see what looks like a crime hotspot; it turns out to be the police station, because that's where the crimes are reported. A strange mix of data protection wibblery and the British reluctance to let anyone know any sort of personal detail unless it's on page 3 of the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, in which case anything goes, seems to apply.
So unlike the peerless original, chicagocrime.org (which now relocates to an Everyblock site), you can't see where things have actually happened - unless they're things you probably don't care that much about. By contrast, a random click on the Everyblock link there takes me to the 00 block of North Lamon Avenue in Chicago where there was a report at 9.50am on February 23 of "Narcotics: manufacturing/delivery of heroin (white)". Detailed enough for you? By contrast, you can find out that the level of robbery in London's W1 is high (http://maps.police.uk/view/metropolitan/, keep zooming in) - but nothing about where things have happened.
But the police here have never really wanted to give away their crime reports, and the information commissioner, in backing up the claims that reporting the location of crimes would somehow intrude on privacy, has helped them. It's instructive to revisit the attitudes to this with the police, which were ably summed up by the former Met Police deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick, who you might expect (given that he was subsequently a Liberal Democrat candidate for London mayor) to be welcoming in his views.
Not according to the interview he gave on the Today programme in May 2008, which we transcribed on the Free Our Data blog.
Here's part of how it went.
Q: But it's just telling people where crime happens.
Paddick: But we should be focussing on what will improve the effectiveness of police. The New York success of accountability didn't come through making the crime data available to the public, but to Comstat, where police commanders were compared to their peers in open forum. We have tried that in London, where we have half dozen commanders – we asked those who do better what the secret is so they can tell the others…. The police already use crime mapping data themselves, using it in a sophisticated way. The only difference between what happens [now] and what Boris Johnson is suggesting [in proposing crime mapping] is that of making it public.
Q So the police already have mapping street by street to decide where to deploy resources – all Boris Johnson is suggesting is to make it public.
Paddick: yes… there are systems to hold police commanders accountable though meetings. Making crime maps available down to street level is a lot of pain for very little gain.
Q But if we do what New York did, why might we not get better results?
Paddick: It has to be said that Comstat process – that is, holding local police commanders to account in one room and account for why crime had gone up or down – whether or not that worked depended who was chairing the meeting. It's not a very British thing to hold people to account in front of their peers. It had mixed results depending on how the chair held them to account.
You have to love that bit about "It's not a very British thing to hold people to account in front of their peers." Then again, MPs are getting used to it....
