On Police Stations and Crime

An insightful piece by London Mayor Boris Johnson today and he summed up very well the issue of how useful Police buildings and stations are in fighting crime;

Police buildings do not make arrests. They do not lumber down the street in pursuit of criminals. They do not observe crime, and according to most criminologists there is no real evidence that they even deter crime – not just by sitting there as an inanimate structure of bricks and mortar.

Crime is not fought by buildings, but by the men and women of our police force; and in the teeth of a long economic downturn, and with all budgets facing a huge squeeze, it is those flesh and blood human beings who are doing an outstanding job.

We have another problem on UKCrimeStats with Police Stations – we don’t know where they all are and only government can tell us this. This matters because some crimes with no location – or more often, rather not correctly geolocated by Police with their respective Gazetteer – are sometimes relocated at the nearest Police Station. This creates a compound distortion over time for people looking at crime on or near their street and we would like to adjust for these.

 

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