Interviews

London crime dashboard – but not online?

by Mark Rowe

A new online, interactive dashboard can let Londoners see what is happening with recorded crime in their area and how well their local police are doing.

The ‘Crime Dashboard‘ – the first in a series of dashboards to be launched says the Mayor of London’s Office – takes raw data available on other sites and turns it into charts showing crime in all 32 London boroughs.

The dashboard shows that on the latest monthly figures, the recorded crime drop last year in the capital outpaced the national fall and accounts for almost half of the reduction across England and Wales. For the first time the data shows that crime nationally would be rising by 0.4 per cent were it not for the Met performance.

However the London Assembly makes the point that Londoners are being robbed of millions of pounds a year through bank, credit card and other online frauds but these thefts are not being recorded in official crime statistics. Hence the Assembly has set up an Online Crime Working Group to look at cyber-fraud; the Met’s new Fraud and Linked Crime Online (FALCON) command and non-reporting and public awareness of cyber-fraud. The group recently questioned Prof Mark Button, Director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies, at the University of Portsmouth; Professor Marian Fitzgerald, Visiting Professor of Criminology, University of Kent; and Simon Dukes, Chief Executive Officer, of the fraud prevention trade body, CIFAS.

For a transcript of the discussion click here. Dukes agreed to provide the working group with a map he referred to during the discussion, which showed the location of crimes reported to CIFAS within a kilometre of City Hall within the last few months.

Dukes told the group of London Assembly councillors that CIFAS was seeing ‘probably 1,000 new frauds every day. All of those are reported to law enforcement.’ He added: “However, they are not included in the official crime statistics, as you quite rightly say and as has been said before. My understanding is that if you added those types of crimes to the crime statistics, you would get quite a significant rise.”

And Marian Fitzgerald made the point that ‘since 2007 any victim of card fraud or fraud of any kind is not supposed, as they would if they were a victim of burglary or theft or whatever, to go to the local police. If they go to the local police, they find that the police are not interested. That is partly because the police have been given a dispensation that they can keep these off their books, thank goodness, since they are under the cosh to endlessly keep crime figures looking as though they are going down and have been caught out in the ways in which they did that. However, these offences were to be reported to something called Action Fraud, which most victims, I suspect, would never have heard of.’ She added that the chances of victims getting satisfaction, even in that knowledge that someone was not done for their crime but someone was done for a lot of other crimes probably including theirs, are so remote that she could not see why most victims would be motivated to report a cyber-crime.

Speaking at the Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime’s (MOPAC) monthly Challenge Board meeting, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: ‘London is one of the safest big cities in the world and crime is falling year after year. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for Londoners to see exactly what that means for their area so they can feel even greater confidence in the work of the police. By taking what can be a dense labyrinth of data and transforming it into something clear and concise you can now track crime levels close to home and see how their local police respond. We know there are challenges and that this dashboard does not paint a perfect picture but progress is being made and working together with the Met police we are confident we can bring crime down even further.’

And the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Stephen Greenhalgh said: ‘We challenged the Met to drive down crime by 20 per cent and they have more than risen to the challenge, with many boroughs having already exceeded this target more than a year early. This dashboard makes it easier for people to see crime data in one place and it clearly shows that while boroughs are much safer than two years ago, others have more work to do. By shining a spotlight on local performance, we hope the public will understand more about the real facts about crime in London.’

Helen King, Assistant Commissioner Territorial Policing, said: ‘It is important that the public understands the progress we are making in reducing crime in London and welcome this initiative by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.

‘I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our officers, partners and the public for all their hard work and support which has enabled us to make London one of the safest capitals in the world.’

Visit www.london.gov.uk/mopac-data.

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