A somewhat mixed reception so far to the new crime maps freely available to all on line, provided the website can cope with the demand.
The soon-to-be-abolished National Policing Improvement Agency carried out a randomised controlled trial which found that the public’s reaction to information about crime and policing was positive.
Mark Easton feels that although few would argue that it is a bad thing for the public to be given information, the question is whether they will be willing and able to use it effectively.
Kevin McConway on Understanding Uncertainty hopes that some of the problems with the data on the new website can be ironed out.
Over on Floating Sheep Alex Singleton worries about the increasing tendency for such sites to be built without consultation with Geographers, while Paul, a retired police officer who is doing a PhD using Metropolitan Police Service data in the Geography Department at University College London, finds the new site ‘impressive but with fundamental problems.’
I have not been able to log on to the site yet – it will be interesting to see how the problems identified by these commentators, who have looked mainly at crowded urban areas, apply to our sparsely populated hills. But all this discussion of geographic mapping seems a very long way from what seemed then to be the magic of George Gaits use of black & white line printers in the 1960’s to produce maps locating statistical information in geographical space for the old Ministry of Housing & Local Government.
