Trial of new “Crime Mapper” tool on Dorset Police website. Verdict: Crude
THE CRIME Mapper is meant to give you the chance to see how much crime there’s been where you live.
Move over a map and zoom in and out, and it will tell you the total number of crimes per month per area, and how that number compares with the same period last year. You can also break down crimes into four categories – burglary, robbery, violence and vehicle crime. Anti-social behaviour is on there too.
If you want to find out how your area compares with other parts of Dorset, or other parts of England and Wales, you can.
So, for example, in the area covered by the Marshwood Vale Safer Neighbourhood Team during August 2009, there were no robberies, and there were none in the same month the year before. In the tough Huyton district of Liverpool, there were 3 robberies in August 2009, and 7 in August the year before. (I chose part of Liverpool for a comparison, because I remember Bridport’s section commander Inspector Alan Jenkins once telling me what a contrast there was between crime rates in West Dorset and places like Liverpool, and how lucky people in West Dorset were – and he’s right of course, we are lucky…)
But what is the Crime Mapper actually like to use? There’s a link to it here if you want to have a go.
I’d say it’s slow and clunky, rather like a 1980s video game. You have to click on some things at least twice before they work, and – until you get used to it – move your mouse in a counter-intuitive way.
The maps showing Dorset broken down into policing sections are also disconcerting. They mis-spell places like “Uploaders” and “Wooton Fitzpaine”, and show some villages in weird geographical relation to others (West Milton is not a few miles slightly north-east of Uploders, I’m sure it’s not).
But the main problem is that the service doesn’t tell you enough. Once you’ve found out that (say) there were eight burglaries in the Marshwood Vale during August 2009, compared with three in August 2008, you want to know where they were, and when they were, and what was taken, and has anybody been arrested, and so on, and so on. Were the break-ins to farms or homes?
The service has been set up by the Government nationally so that people can, if they want to, hold their local police to account. But more detail and context is needed, as in the USA, where sites like everyblock.com tap into amazing sources of up-to-date information. You can famously find out if someone’s been arrested in your neighbourhood within the last hour. Choose any city, look under public records, then crimes: it’s a real eye-opener.
The Crime Mapper is interesting as far as it goes, but crude.