About once a week, somebody emails me wanting to place an infographic on our website about crime statistics and security solutions to drive traffic to their webiste and push their product at no cost to themselves. Nothing commercially wrong with that. And I would go further, crime preventative measures should in general be much more part of the conversation rather than crime solving. However, we don’t accept inforgraphics because invariably they are not using our data – which we can verify – and basically they want free advertising.
Moreover, often enough, it’s not even relevant – like an infographic on crime data in the USA !
We also have a big responsibility here. Our primary mission is to make clear what the crime data actually shows – warts and all. I will never sugarcoat the gaps and limitations in crime data. And running this website does cost money – developer time, servers, analytical time etc.
We are not paid for by government like www.police.uk (a monopoly a bit like the BBC but with a much larger market share – 95%) or given uncompetitive advantages – first use and discriminatory access to the data.
So we work very hard to differentiate ourselves and offer much more sophtisticated insights, including now on property price, Land Registry corporate ownership data and energy consumption. That’s why need your subscriptions, data purchases and bespoke requirements to keep us going. UKCrimestats.com evolved out of a think tank I launched a decade ago, with the principal aim of closing the gap between policy and knowledge. And with this website, we have come a long way in doing that and want to keep doing so.
If you are someone who wants to buy advertising space on our website, request bespoke data research on something else, please get in touch on crime@economicpolicycentre.com .