A new website called Police.uk, launched today by the Home Office, has been built to give citizens in England and Wales up-to-date and dynamic information on crime and police presence in their local area. It's the first website to give street-by-street information on every crime event and act of anti-social behaviour reported to police.
By entering your postcode, the website can show recently reported crimes. You can then view profiles of local bobbies, read recent tweets from official police accounts, find out information on upcoming beat meetings and even see CCTV footage of incidents. It cost £300,000 and took six months to develop.
You can also see those offences sorted into six broad categories -- violent crime, burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, anti-social behaviour and other crime -- and pinned on a Google map down to a range of 12 houses.
The raw data is being provided as a free API to programmers and app developers in the government's larger scheme to release information from national and local governments to the public and developers.
Last year, Transport for London gave the public access to real-time information on the city's underground tube network, which inspired
websites and mobile apps. The Prime Minister has also made a commitment to publishing local government spending over £500, in an effort to provide financial transparency.
At the time of writing, the Police.uk website is having a tough time coping with demand, and its servers are struggling to stay up. The Home Government's Twitter feed says "Hugely popular crime maps getting 75,000 hits per minute so you might experience delays. Keep trying."
It's also receiving some criticism over worries that showing high crime rates will negatively affect house prices in certain areas.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
