Thames Valley incidents located inside Warwickshire Police areas

[Dan Lewis]

Thanks to an eagle eyed UKCrimeStats viewer, we have after further investigation uncovered what could be a major issue with the police.uk data. Basically, if you look at February 2014 data from Police.uk – it is clear that Thames Valley and Warwickshire Police are using the same snap-points to geolocate crimes/ASB incidents.

In one particular example, this otherwise quiet LSOA in Warwickshire http://www.ukcrimestats.com/LSOA/E01031209 has an additional 27 ASB incidents ascribed to it by Thames Valley Police in February 2014 alone on a largely uninhabited country lane, while Warwickshire geolocated just one burglary. This matters on UKCrimeStats because we percentage rank the LSOAs relative to each other as combined asb and crime and the separate categories as well. Basically they are both using this snap-point;

longitude -1.617375, latitude 52.015316

It also means the neighbourhood of Shipston http://ukcrimestats.com/Neighbourhood/Warwickshire_Police/Shipston has unusually high ASB incidents. We have written to the Home Office to ask for clarification and indeed if the problem is much more widespread between other Forces as well, which we suspect it is. We can’t make any changes until they can tell us the full extent of the problem and what they intend to do about it.

[Dan Lewis]

Ok, we’ve told the Home Office and they agree it looks wrong – it looks to be an issue at source with Thames Valley – but that is far upstream from where we are. We have done some further investigation across our database and discovered that there are actually over 8,000 locations that are shared between Police Forces and even two locations shared between 6 Forces. We have given the data to the Home Office and await their response.

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