We have a new initiative in England which enables anybody with internet access to see how many crimes of various categories have been committed (or reported to the police) in any given area during the previous month. Just visit the web site at www.police.uk and type in the appropriate post code, eg EC1Y 0TL which was the post code of my office before I retired, and up pops a map with the details.
The intention, we are told, is to make the police more accountable. Presumably more accountable to the general population. I'm not quite sure how these maps are going to achieve that. Indeed, I'm uncertain that this information will actually achieve anything at all - other than worry people who are considering buying a house in an area which is shown to have a high occurrence of burglaries. The logical knock-on effect of that would be to drive down the price of houses in those areas and cause worry to people who are either trying to sell for whatever reason and those who are not looking to move but were previously unaware of the level of crime.
I was surprised to find that even in my relatively quiet and, so I thought, respectable part of town there were 180 instances of crime and anti-social behaviour during December, including 17 violent crimes.
2 comments:
It seems to be a veritable hotbed of criminal activity.
Not to appear the cynic, but I wonder how many crimes go unreported.
It's not the best part of London. I forget how many times our offices were broken into. Once we lost every computer in the place, another time somebody crawled across the false ceiling and fell through onto my desk.
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