Crime in North Wales – what’s happening?

Last Saturday morning I was invited to speak at a workshop entitled “Let’s work out a Police & Crime Plan for North Wales” organised by Richard Hibbs, the Independent Candidate for North Wales – details of the occasion are here. It was an excellent event, lots of different and engaging viewpoints – plurality in other words, which is what democracy is all about. And last but not least, it was in Llandudno, a true jewel of a town in North Wales. Much as I liked Richard, here at UKCrimeStats, as a rule, we don’t take sides behind any candidate as this would be a conflict of interest. We only look at the data and work hard to give it context and meaning over time periods, different boundaries etc. to the general populace.

Anyway, I thought you may like to see my presentation;

here is the powerpoint

here is the underlying data in two spreadsheets – North Wales by Neighbourhood and North Wales compared to all Police Forces. If you want to routinely pick up this level of data from UKCrimStats – just subscribe from £9.99 a month.

I’m expecting to do quite a lot of these presentations over the next few months, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like an outside independent voice to tell you what your local crime data says. We are just starting now to work more with Local Authorities, Local Media and Insurance Companies who value our independence and flourishing capabilities.

For all that, once again we found an open and shut case of why we need independent analysis by third parties of the crime data, because we alone seem to spot the errors and have a vested interest in making sure they are cleaned up. Take a look at the neighbourhood boundary of Mostyn in Llandudno which I’ve taken from Police.uk;

a good 60% of Mostyn’s neighbourhood boundary was in the sea – an incredibly bad error !

This is not something we can fix ourselves, we don’t know where the boundary should be. But as we use Police.uk data – and in this case, neighbourhood kml files we have no choice but to replicate it – here is our neighbourhood page for Mostyn. I’ve also written this up  on our forum where I direct the NPIA and the Home Office to get the details on the errors from.

So hopefully this will get fixed soon. Llandudno deserves better !