I was just reading this article which was unusual because it was a detailed monthly update on crime in a specific neighbourhood – Thame. Thame falls under the jurisdiction of Thames Valley Police. I’m sure in the years to come we will see many more of these online reports of what’s going on and this is much to be welcomed – so well done Thame Neighbourhood Policing Team.
Anyway, right at the end, it said log on to police.uk but it didn’t say log on to UKCrimeStats !
Well here are some good reasons why you should log on to UKCrimeStats as well.
And by way of comparative example, here’s police.uk’s page for Thame and here is ours from UKCrimeStats.
1. UKCrimeStats displays the population of Thame – 11,072
2. UKCrimeStats shows the Neighbourhood Crime League table (within 5 miles) adjusted for population (as crime rate) and displaying the different totals for each type and ASB. This means we can show a ranking or you can sort by different types using the online pivot table.
3. UKCrimeStats has easy to understand charts and pie charts tracking monthly data per neighbourhood since December 2010 (because not everyone likes numbers and some much prefer pictures)
4. UKCrimeStats has a table with monthly totals for each crime and ASB type – you do not have to change page to see all of them
5. On UKCrimeStats, if you click on a crime/ASB pin you can not only give information to the local Neighbourhood Team, you can pass on information to Crimestoppers or tweet it because each crime/ASB event has a unique url, like this one here.
6. When you click on that unique url – in this case a vehicle crime, you will also see a table listing all the vehicle crimes since December 2010 within 5 miles of that specific location. Not all crime is local, criminals certainly don’t respect administrative borders but fear of crime is local and people want to get an idea of risk in their area. Saying a given neighbourhood across England and Wales falls under average, as Police.uk does, isn’t really that useful.
7. And last but not least, you can advertise by Neighbourhood so that your ads appear when anyone selects a specific neighbourhood, a crime page in that area or a postcode within it. Read all about how to do it here – really very easy and inexpensive, much cheaper than local newspapers. And get registered here – we also offer 50% discounts for Appeals for information from the victims of crime – from £12.50 per month.
There are other reasons too – we are independent for a start of both the Home Office and the Police. Some of you have asked why we don’t show the photos of the Officers – well that’s because for reasons known only to the Home Office and Police.uk, they have not been made available to 3rd Party developers such as ourselves. To be honest though, I’m not sure how much we want them, there’s lots of other useful data we’d rather have first. But if you want to look up a Policeman/woman by name, you can do that in the search box too. And you can’t do that on Police.uk either !