The police.uk website has been revamped with new functions, offering access to information about crime. Functions new include:
Email alerts informing people when crime data for their area is updated;
The ability to compare performances of their local police with similar forces; and
Crime prevention advice relating to specific offences which site users search for.
The site, which has received 634 million hits since it was created in 2011, continues to attract more than 471,000 visits per month. People can use police.uk to set up personalised “crime maps” – information on crime, anti-social behaviour and criminal justice outcomes – which they can then share with other website users.
Home Secretary Theresa May, pictured, said: “Detailed, street-level crime maps are one of the IT successes of this Government. Re-launching police.uk, with a new look and new functions will give the public even more access to information about crime and how it is dealt with in their community. The site empowers the public to hold their local police and wider criminal justice system to account and ensure crime continues to be driven down. We are determined to ensure the police and criminal justice system is as transparent as possible and publishing tailored information on police.uk is a key way of doing that.”
For London crime maps visit the Met Police website.
However there is the question of what makes up the statistics and in other words whether what crimes are put on the books and which are for whatever reason not, as the House of Commons public administration committee is looking into. Or as the committee put it in parliamentary language, ‘the extent to which adequate procedures are in place to promote a culture of data integrity within the police’. Visit the parliament.uk website.
Background
As the committee says, crime statistics come from two main sources: crime recorded by the police, and crime reported through the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
The recording of crime is the responsibility of individual police forces. Following a Review of Crime Statistics by the National Statistician in 2011, the Government took the decision to move the publication of crime statistics from the Home Office to the Office for National Statistics, in order to demonstrate their political independence.
Separately, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (formerly the British Crime Survey) is a face-to-face survey, which includes crimes that are not reported to the police as well as those that are. This inquiry does not intend to examine the Crime Survey in depth, but intends to focus on police recorded crime.
There are two main difficulties in knowing what crime has really been committed. Firstly, the public do not report all crime. Secondly, it is very difficult to standardise the way that police forces record offences. In addition, there are concerns that some in some cases, crimes are recorded inaccurately by police forces in order to meet targets. Recently, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary undertook an inspection on crime recording in Kent at the request of the Kent Police and Crime Commissioner, and published a report on the issue in June 2013, concluding that “more needs to be done before the people of Kent can be confident that the crime and resolution figures published by the force are as accurate as they should be”.
