Home Office crime maps go to street-level detail The Home Office has announced the rollout of a new online crime-map service for England and Wales that ministers describe as "more comprehensive than any other scheme" in the world. The new mapping service offers crimes arranged by street, rather than merely by ward or subdistrict as before. Screengrab of the Home Office crime …
street-level mapping may preserve anonymity in metropolitan areas, but what about farming areas?
If you live in Guthram Gowt, and it says 1 violent crime (it doesn't today) then the equation is simple. Either you were beating your wife or the bloke over the road was. If it wasn't you, then he has lost anonymity.
Another instance of the people who run this country thinking that UK == London.
... A tool to allow criminals to select the areas most worth committing crime in,
It uses Google Maps (so that's why the Govt is cosying up to them and allows them to get away with their tax avoidance through Ireland).
Unfortunately, I'm running a Microsoft OS which manages to prevent me from succesfully accessing Google Maps from *any* of the browsers on my PC.
There are (since you don't seem to be aware of it), several versions of Windows.
The server versions often don't support widely-used programs.
And before you complain that people shouldn't be running a browser on a server, consider that there are reasons to run Windows Server other than as a server. You just haven't met them.
I use Windows 2008 R2 on my personal laptop and I can assure you it runs widely-used programs without a hitch. And rare programs too.
Even Steam and other gaming platforms.
Usually what happens is that the installer check the Windows version and refuses to install, so you have to hack the installer. No big deal. That was a bigger problem on Windows 2003 which had a different kernel version from XP, but now Windows Servers use the same kernel as the Windows "Clients".
Well Mr GrahamS, where do you think that Microsoft has its European HQ then?
Lo and behold, it is The Republic of Ireland.
Where do you think their US HQ is for Tax purposes?
Nevada.
Whgat state has 0% Corporate Income Tax rate?
That same Nevada.
I'm not saying that Google is all goody two shoes but many US companies use the ROI as their base simply because of Tax issues. Adobe is another one that springs to mind.
I imagine there will be many property owners upset at the information displayed as it forces the value of their properties yet lower, as if the banking industry hadn't done enough.
The insurers will love it though, as they will use it, no doubt, to force their premiums further skyward.
Criminals will be able to pick 'quiet' spots where Plod doesn't expect trouble so their escape is almost guranteed.
A winner all round?
I love it when the property owning classes complain about that. They got their property while it was dirt cheap and now no one should ever be allowed to have cheap property ever again because it would make them feel a little bit sad!
Where did I put my violin...
Don't worry you'll be dead soon and then I'll squat in your house for free. Swings and roundabouts.
Ahh the moemories......watching the freeloader fly out of the 1st floor window was worth the cost of the broken glass.
Officer? I went into my house and this man attacked me and in the struggle he went flying....
Roundabouts and slides....
Like people who've worked hard for their 2-bed terraces? Property speculators, developers and landlords without social conscience may be deserving of abuse, but why others? Sounds like you want something for nothing, just don't try to kid yourself you're part of an "alternative society" because you can't be bothered to contribute to this one but are happy to leech off it.
These days every time someone asks for "something they could reasonably afford in a lifetime of hard work" they are accused of wanting "something for nothing".
I guess the squatting joke really hit a nerve with some of you. But squatting is a real problem caused at least partly by a lack of affordable housing. And what is being done about it? Fuck all of any value.
It's easier to stick your head in the sand and assume that the people complaining about affordable housing are just a bunch of vagrant unemployed drug addicts and losers who would never contribute to the economy anyway, not even by accident. And every one of them drives a Lamborghini that they got by cheating the benefits system. It has to be true if it's in the Daily Mail.
When the reality is that they're working the shitty dregs of the employment market for employers who are going to make damn sure that they squeeze every last penny and fire anyone who complains. No doubt the company they work for doesn't pay tax either but there's always plenty of money left over for executive bonuses.
I guess it’s just “one of those things”. One of those things that no one is going to bother doing anything about because they'd sooner die than upset the applecart.
A couple of ways spring to mind. Moving house? Crime levels in the local area are going to be of interest to most people I would have thought. Secondly, this could prove a useful insight to the people who moan about how the police never do anything about the high levels of crime in their locale when in fact nobody actually bothers reporting the crime in the first place - at least this will give an indication of that.
"It was working, and then it broke, remarkably, when lots of people went to look at it. Of course this has never happened before."
Well quite, Sarah. The first few launch overload fails can be excused.
But we live in a brave new world, where this marvellous Cloud technology is supposed to make such scaling issues a thing of the past. After all, if the Cloud can't solve this, what can it do?
So the launch fail is actually of interest in of itself: what launch planning did they make (if any)? Are they using a scalable server architecture, or pragmatically not caring about the launch, just so long as it works when the initial fuss had died down?
In this brave new world of ubiquitous information access, this kind of problem with groups seeking to exploit ever more information is inevitable. As they say, "Knowledge Is Power" and so everyone who wishes to manipulate others for their own gain, will exploit more knowledge to force people to do what they want.
The answer is to push back. Don't just accept what the insurance agents try to say, haggle with them and if they don't want to give in, then tell them to f*#k off! ... its the meek sheep in this world that allow the manipulators in society to get ever more powerful. If everyone told them no, they would be finished.
Step 1 : Spend a fortune on a Web2.x thingamy
Step 2 : Realise you've blown the budget
Step 3 : Rent a low-end VPS from a kiddy host
Step 4: Splash all over the media with a launch date
Step 5 : Leave your audience looking at "Loading" icons or white pages
Step 6 : Audience go away and may come back in a few months if you're lucky
Step 7 : Pats on the back and Martinis all round
Cretins.
Step 1a
Get sold MS system by salesmen in Mercs.
Step 1b
Develop system and do no load testing at all.
Step 1c
Think that just by getting the front page served up by Amazon cloud stuff that the site will be able to handle the load.
£300k for a system which is deeply flawed - makes me want to weep. This happens again and again and again and again - what is the answer?
We don't want to be told how bad our streets & schools are in the name of choice just for the government of the day attempt to make them all pretty much equal in terms of quality & safety (towards the top end of the quality scale that is).
For them to print tables & point the finger and Heads of School / Police etc is just passing the buck.
Plus unless you have the cash to move area or school there is no choice just a depressing feeling of impotence for those who have to put up with the status quo
Just take responsibility & do something about it
I don't usually post, but this really irritates me. When everyone is trying to save money they spend £300,000 on a website which doesn't even work and keeps responding with "Website error". This data might have been available before, but making it so easily accessible is going to have a negative effect on house prices.
If I'm going to move into an area with a high crime rate I want to know about it, and I want the price of the house discounted accordingly - it's no different to knowing whether the area suffers from subsidence or whether there's a pending planning application to build a supermarket next door.
... what does "nearby" mean? I can think of several areas where I live where there is a less salubrious area next to a very nice one. The first may have high crime rates (usually drugs related), whereas the second doesn't have much a problem at at all.
Alternatively, I can think of an area where there were a couple of very nasty domestic incidents - no-one else was harmed, or likely to be. Should they affect the insurance premiums and house prices for all those "nearby"?
We should be finding a way to reduce house prices, but I'm not sure this is a good way to do it.
In a cloud of "excitement" I went to the police,uk website but found I couldn't retrieve any results.The home page comes up, I entered my post code and clicked on search, but get nothing back - no error message or apparent response. . Tried it using both IE and Chrome, and on my iPhone in case of a network issue.
Perhaps it's down due to customer demand!
The preview might work as advertised, but the live site doesn't. Under IE8 it is a slow as a three legged police dog, and returns a blank screen. With Firefox it is also quite slow but occassionally returns an error that it "Can't find a policing district for this area". Given that I live in Theresa May's constituency, I find that unlikely.
No doubt others have got here first
1) Site doesn't work on launch day, no doubt due to huge amount of press coverage and high demand..
2)) Govt keeps talking, recession, cuts, etc. etc. then spends 300k on project that is very much a gimmick and non essential. (and can't handle demand on launch day)
3) Effect of house prices.. may discourage reporting of minor crimes by homeowners.
that is all
When I got past the internal server errors and the blank screens that claimed to be "done" I finally got: "Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search."
"Deputy Chief Constable Neil Rhodes, speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said the service would "help to build community involvement in policing"."
I see what Neil Rhodes means, I guess the community needs to police itself as no other bugger seems to be doing it.
Now I can move house with a little more peace of mind. Well, if the site worked ...
Or perhaps, when I see £affordable-house advertised, I can see exactly why it's priced low, and not think I'm missing a great bargain. 'Cos an ex-council estate *without* huge crime could start to become really desirable!
As always, what matters is relative levels.
It's either broken, or something very wrong has happened in my area.
I put in my postcode. It recognised it, added the city and county of its own accord and then gave me the comforting message:
"Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search"
Oh well, that's a few hundred off my council tax bill, then. Just need to invest in a baseball bat and a crossbow.
On a related note, I thought they were supposed to be doing less of this sort of thing, not more - what with it being a recession and all that...
.
.
$ whois police.uk
Error for "police.uk".
This domain cannot be registered because it contravenes the Nominet UK naming rules. The reason is:
the domain name contains too few parts.
WHOIS lookup made at 08:57:51 01-Feb-2011
--
This WHOIS information is provided for free by Nominet UK the central registry for .uk domain names.
===========================================
$ whois www.police.uk
This TLD has no whois server.
It is real and Nominet has no control or responsibility for police.uk In fact they only directly control a minority of .uk domains.
Others that I can think of off the top of my head : gov.uk, nhs.uk, ac.uk, mod.uk - I'm sure that there are others.
That they don't have a whois server or your whois client can't find it if there is one is another matter.
$ nslookup www.police.uk
Server: 192.168.1.254
Address: 192.168.1.254#53
Non-authoritative answer:
www.police.uk canonical name = policeuk-167782603.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Name: policeuk-167782603.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com
Address: 46.137.112.210
$ whois 46.137.113.134
<snip>
inetnum: 46.137.0.0 - 46.137.127.255
netname: AMAZON-EU-AWS
descr: Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, EU
remarks: The activity you have detected originates from a
dynamic hosting environment.
<snip>
$ ping www.police.uk
PING policeuk-167782603.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com (46.137.113.145) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- policeuk-167782603.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1003ms
So, it is registered on the Amazon Elastic Cloud and hosted in Rack Space. Wasn't that hard, was it?
Paris - because she has been known to stretch the odd cloud now and then.
According to my reading, Plod has not followed a Buy British policy instead awarding their property devaluation system to Amazon Data Services in Ireland. NoScrupt users will have to permit several different websites before it works.
I searched for a couple of places in Sussex and nothing showed up although Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire has more anti-social activity than any other category.
And whilst it OFFERED "Stonehenge, Salisbury, South England SP4 7DE, UK" it subsequently responded with "Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search."
Obviously another UK Government success story.
"According to my reading, Plod has not followed a Buy British policy instead awarding their property devaluation system to Amazon Data Services in Ireland. NoScrupt users will have to permit several different websites before it works."
And very helpfully, it tells me when I go to the site that I need to enable Javascript. Meh.
Enable Javascript for police.co.uk. Meh.
Enable Javascript for amazonaws.com. Meh
Enter postcode.
Wait.
Wait a bit longer.
"Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search".
Who on earth did they employ to build this POS? A couple of monkeys hammering away at a keyboard until something approximating to code appeared?
3 thefts reported inside 12 months , 2 from the car and one from the garage and not a dot , blob or icon to be seen, either on my road or any of the surrounding streets / avenues.....
Think the mash has it right...a tool to keep us all in line.....
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/crime-map-to-keep-you-nice-and-scared-201102013489/
after 20 minutes, I finally got the page to load in Chrome (IE as usual being a dead loss). Only to be told that they couldn't find a policing area that matched my search.
£300,000 for this ? I sincerely hope they had some SLA in place (that's a joke btw).
If that had provided a webservice and a simple API, they would easily have had several sites light-years ahead of this shite.
And I have to pay more tax for these retards ?
However, I used it at about 8am. It worked and was quite interesting. In my area, there is a lot of violent crime near the night clubs and the pubs. I also find out that the level of crime in the area is classed as high. Also the police want to shut down the police station here!
I would say it is useful information. However, it seems to be for December 2010 only.
For some unfathomable reason it will be accumulating data from now on. Why historic data can't be included with a couple of quick SQL commands to populate it from the old data I can't imagine.
I suppose the police are going to be even busier now, dragging google map orange markers onto the place where Sharon says that Dave sent her a text threatening to slash her.
Site is running Windows Server 2003
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=www.police.uk&x=0&y=0
On the bright side, the government normally pays millions for IT stuff that doesn't work. If this one was only £300K then that's a comparitive bargain - for something that doesn't work.
Yep that's the issue for sure, they used all the money to buy a Micro$oft Server which can not handle the traffic, now if they'd used an Linux server it would have been cheaper, more secure and performed better, but government don't do Open Source, they don't trust it, if it doesn't cost > £65k they don't trust it.
I wonder how many police staff were involved in data entry rather than their primary duty of protecting life and property... maybe they have added a new one to that list, 'or reporting violations to life and property'
I would sooner they arrived on scene than entered it in a database.
Every police force sends data to the Home Office. It's done using data extracts. Obviously individual police officers don't sit around typing data into this new system. A lot of people who read
The Register don't seem to have much knowledge of the real world.
... just like to put the boot into the police for being sinister, Orwellian agents of the State who get everywhere and know everything about every one of us, monitoring each individual's life in minuscule detail and occasionally subjecting us to terrifying brutality and stealing our cameras (which of course is a national police conspiracy and not just misunderstanding by individual officers of inconsistent guidance on terrorism); and for *simultaneously* being fat, lazy, stupid and never leaving the station unless crowbarred out.
Meh. I don't think it really matters what you hate them for, as long as you hate them.
I live in a thriving town with lots of transport links, and a cop shop just around the corner.
Put in my postcode, I get: "Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search"
So, despite a valued member of our esteemed government on the radio this morning getting quite bolshy at any suggestion the site might fall over under the surge of demand, it still doesn't work.
Which means that our glorious leaders have provided us with something they say will benefit us all, but which doesn't meet the public's needs and isn't available to everyone.
Of government attempting to do IT.
It'll be under funded, ill planned, inadequate, old, out of date technology which can not handle the load.
It will not have been thought out, and the whole thing designed by committee.
Lets say I work in such an environment, I know how these things go!
to those moaning about the £300k spent on this, do we really think this was built in under a year?
I'm not saying it was money well spent but I strongly suspect this is one of those signed off under the dying government that the new one let finish as it was probably cheaper than killing it.
PS: I know, a front page and a blank page could be done in under a year, I was talking about the pile of crap that they actually produced....
they're using Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, E.
Although I think they must have paid the invoice in Walkers crisp packets for all the computing power that seems to be eminating from the service.
This is Monopoly City Streets [circa 2010] all over again, although in that instance it wasn't being funded by a large proportion of my bastarding wage...
No load test
No overage plan
No SLA
No-ones head on the block...
Big fat hairy bollocking knobs...
Looks like they're running Django or PHP on that based on the Twitter details of the lead developer.
But you know what the real problem is? They hired a fricking ad agency, and these companies often have developers, but they often have little clue about actual software engineering. Scale things up and they go pop quite quickly. There's a big difference between some dink pub finder and building something for a national audience.
My guess, they just thought they could stick it on EC2 and not have to worry. Yeah... about that...
I'd been hoping to use information from this site for a Crime & Welfare report to our Parish Council this evening.
"Server error.
"The web page at http://www.police.uk/ is currently unavailable. It may be overloaded or down for maintenance."
So now I can't get _any_ Police information at all!
Outstanding.
(Posting anonymously so that there's no question of representing my views as those of our Parish Council.)
The level of demand is obviously going to be massively more than what it would usually receive later on.
So are people actually suggesting they should spend resources on systems that can cope with a massive demand, for the couple of days when it first launches, even though it'll be unnecessary later on? And people are also complaining about wasting money?
(If this was a company, people would be spinning it as a good thing - "Look how popular demand for the product is!")
It's a very good point, but what did they expect? Launch something interesting with a lot of publicity, you could reasonably expect there to be a lot of demand for it. The Public Records Office know to have extra capacity available when 'Who Do You Think You Are?' is on, so why can't Plod think the same way?
Scotland's a different country with a separate legal system. They wouldn't normally be included in crime figures for England and Wales.
Wales, on the other hand, has historically (and I'm not going into the politics of this) been handled as part of England and shares a single criminal law system. For now, anyway.
Found in the source in one of it's pages.....
<noscript>
<div id="no-js">
This website requires JavaScript in order to function properly. Either your web browser doesn't support JavaScript or it is currently disabled. Please enable JavaScript or use a JavaScript-enabled web browser. Alternatively, you can <a href="/data">download the latest crime figures</a>.
<div id="welsh">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec odio. Quisque volutpat mattis eros. Nullam malesuada erat ut turpis. Suspendisse urna nibh, viverra non, semper suscipit, posuere a, pede. Jjbhdmn skjd skj <a href="">sdfj skns dns kndpkqnd ljd kwjnr psk</a>.
</div>
</div>
</noscript>
How come there's only 6 categories ? Surely "taking photographs" and "protesting" need categories of their own, as most arrests these days seem to stem from those two activities?
Also, had to laugh at the intro on the news last night - "From midnight tonight, a new police service will be available to residents of England & Wales..." Thank feck for that, cos the previous one was SHITE.
Get the data at: http://www.police.uk/data
Supplied in a zipped csv (grouped by by force) Crimes listed by easting / northing and steet.
Api appears to be available. Docs at http://www.police.uk/api/docs/
So anyone moaning about the lack of api can stop. (Although I haven't tried it out to be fair)
As for it timing out/crashing ... seriously announcements in all the national press about something that is slightly controversial and you are surprised that it is knackered!!!
I was involved, peripherally, when the Census site failed due to overload on its first day.
Correction: not "overload" but badly spec-ed, under-tested and with toy hardware. Inexperienced designers, not very good prime contractor & inadequate kit. It to months to fix.
When will these Public Sector twerps realise that if they are planning a system that is going to be on every news channel on the day of its launch, they'd better get some experienced advice as to what the load might be.
If it is going to be many tens of thousands per minute, then they'd better talk to the pros in the Banks and other places where they take loads like that, per second!
£300k, if that's what it cost to do the web app is nothing compared to the cost of all the police and associated admin staff it took to collect, tabulate, check, input and analyse the information that goes into making it. Wonder why there's never a policeman around when you need one?
I tried this very early this morning, and it worked really well. I now feel safe to walk my road at night without anything happening to me... Although I am curious what the "violent crime" was just round the corner... I must complain to the local curtain twitchers about the lack of gossip.
I also signed up for an API key, but haven't heard anything back from them. Probably too busy trying to transfer the access database onto something more capable!
Aside all the rabid police hate, there's not really much scope for the Government to win here. Keep crime figures quiet and they're accused of not being transparent. Release the crime figures in the conventional way and they're accused of fiddling the numbers. Create a direct access for people to find the figures and they're accused of wasting money and fiddling the numbers. And incompetence in IT, obviously.
Personally, I'm in the 'waste of money' camp here, but only because I think the whole enterprise is pointless. I agree with the principle probably not written by Robert Peel that the measure of effective policing should be the absence of crime and disorder; and as far as that goes all we need is numbers. But if we're going to assume the numbers are all a con anyway - as they may well be - then there's not really any point at all.
I suggest we all just adopt the proper stance of abject fear and paranoid mistrust of everyone. It's easy, cheap and fashionable.
It doesn't actually report crimes, so much as reported crimes. If I recall, you have to be convicted for a crime to have occurred. The "ASB" statistic clearly states that the number includes all reported antisocial behaviour. So all it takes is one busy body to call up plod a few times with complaints about some noise / party / loud music / dog barking / alarm going off and you have a real crime black spot in your area.
Ah, very good point.
What they should add is all the fields divided into several columns.
Reported/Solved/Unsolved
That would certainly show some useful info.
Although it would also be nice to see what punishment the little toe-rags get too. From what I've seen on "Police stop camera you've been framed action", the going rate for driving without insurance, tax, MOT or a license is £200 and a 12 month ban on the license you don't have... Significantly cheaper than paying for road tax, insurance and MOT!
This post has been deleted by its author
"(House prices have plummeted of course. Sales of car alarms way up, though.)"
And of course, the plummet in house prices can only be attributed to this one single incident (and the way you describe it I very much doubt it'd have been logged as a crime in any case).
Needless to say, the universal drop in house prices caused by the economic slump couldn't have had *anything* to do with it...
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