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Hyperlocal in the UK

Police Crime Mapping Site Goes Live

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This morning, well last night actually, www.police.uk went live.

Police.uk allows you to look at crime data by place name postcode or address, so really handy if you are looking to move, but also quite a handy content idea for your Hyperlocal site.

By entering a postcode you get several views available:

Overview

Just that, an overview on one page that shows you the local policing unit, along with, phone number, E-mail address and pictures of the officers & PCSOs (if they are available from the force site). A twitter feed from the force, a crime map, details of the next event in the area sucha as PACT meetings, and links to the main force site, micro-sites, FaceBook etc.

Crime Maps

A nice interactive Google map with all the crime mapped for you. Each pin is clickable and give you information about the crime, obviously no personal details are given and the map point is only so accurate. You can drag the pin around to get the data in a 2.5k radius from a particular point, your house, your school, office etc. You can then select different types of crime and look at those in isolation. It is a real shame you can’t then embed this map on your own site or even grab a link to it.

Meet The Team

A bigger version of the NPU information on the overview page, this shows all the NPU officers with contact details, a map showing the NPU area and the station they work from. This is driven from the local forces, so some are better than others.

Get Involved

Again an expanded version of the information available on the overview page with details of meetings and events.

Information & advice

Links out to other resources about minimising the risk of crime etc.

Other stuff

Data, you can download the data sets from. Data  is available by street or neighbourhood for each force.
Data by neighbourhood will give you a csv with these headings:

  • Month
  • Force
  • Neighbourhood
  • All crime and ASB
  • Burglary
  • Anti-social behaviour
  • Robbery
  • Vehicle crime
  • Violent crime
  • Other crime

Data by street gives you:

  • Month
  • Reported by
  • Falls within
  • Easting
  • Northing
  • Location
  • Crime type
  • Context

All the data is licensed under the Open Government Licence.  I’m going to play with the CSV files later today to see what I can make, as I’m pretty sure many others will be doing today. As @stef has just pointed out you can hack the URL to pull the data for a lat long pair without downloading the data set.

Apps, not really apps, just a link to the mobile site www.police.uk/m/ which will use the GPS location  data from your phone. You can suggest ideas and grab an API key to make your own applications using the data. For some reason, you have to wait to be approved before you get your API key. I’m not sure if they will link to any apps created to use their data on here eventually or just any ‘official’ ones.

My Thoughts

It is a good start, the website is easy to use for people of all abilities and the raw data is available to play with for the more technically minded.

On the down side the data looks like it will be released in batches monthly, I am assuming that the data will only be released for mapping at a certain point in the investigation and not ‘as it happens’.   There are no RSS feeds or embed me links for anything. It would be really nice if you could grab the map for your town, village NPU etc and stick it in your hyperlocal site directly. I’m sure it will only be a matter of time, days or possibly hours, before we see different uses of the raw data emerging using the  tools available on-line.

The biggest drawback I have found is that you can only have the data on the site by NPU, you can’t filter it by station, town or even a division, nor can you do it by the whole force. I would like to see all the crime for the Stoke-on-Trent Division of Staffordshire Police, if I use ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ as a search term I get given the data for the NPU for Hanley, which is the city centre for Stoke-on-Trent.

As I say it is a good start and very local but with a few more hours of development on the site they could have done a lot more with the data for the casual user. If I were scoring the site I think a deserved 7/10 from me.

This is just a quick overview, off you go now, go and play & make things, then come back and show us what you have done in your area. We want to see the best implementation of this data in a hyperlocal site. We may even give a prize at our next unconference.

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Comments

  2. Michael, what doesn’t work? Are you confusing huge demand and the servers not being able to cope with it not working through incomplete code?

    I’ll be interested to see why you are having problems, I used it quite a bit yesterday and came across no such issues.

  3. Same for me never works, I type the area in and select search and then the websites redirects to the map page but the crime map is not loading at all. Same happened yesterday.

    The only time it worked was early hours in the morning. Its a server overload 2 many connection is been made so its refusing any new connections,

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