Crime Maps: Bringing statistics to life

For years the police have been able to plot recorded crimes against local maps in order to see patterns of crime and plan the best ways of deploying officers to tackle it.

Until recently however, such analysis of crime statistics has been restricted, with the general public having no easy way to see this sort of information about their own neighbourhoods.

But the arrival of digital technology and the web are changing this fast: Following in the footsteps of ground breaking projects such as America's chicagocrime.org many police forces in the UK have already launched online crime maps allowing the public to interrogate the statistics themselves, a move that the government are now actively promoting.

Concerns about online crime maps

But crime mapping is not without controversy, with critics arguing that publishing these maps could cause undue fear among the public, breach victims' rights to privacy or affect the reputation and house prices of particular neighbourhoods. Some have even suggested that the maps could become a useful tool for criminals themselves.

The accuracy of the underlying crime data itself has also led to additional concerns that the maps have the potential to be misleading, with reported crime figures being notoriously unreliable (some experts estimate that as much as 60 per cent of crime goes unreported).

How is our Oxford Crime Map different?

For the Truth About Crime we wanted to develop a local crime map that attempted to address this last point: rather than just showing one set of statistics from the police, we wanted to allow comparison between different data sources.

We have gathered data not only from Thames Valley Police, but also from Oxford's emergency services and the CACI Acorn database classification tool used by the British Crime Survey. This was then processed and mapped with the help of some of the UK's most respected mapping experts, led by Spencer Chainey of the Jill Dando institute at London's University College.

The Truth about Crime team have taken careful steps to protect victim anonymity throughout every stage of the project and have not held any confidential information.

Our Oxford Crime Map shows:

• That there are strong correlations between locations where street violence occurs and licensed premises. Like most towns and cities, Oxford's main street violence hot-spot is in the centre of the city, where there is the greatest concentration of pubs, clubs and bars.
• Street violence also occurs at very specific times. Violence peaks after pub and bar closing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Other than at these times, Oxford generally experiences very little street violence.

Street violence occurs at very specific times

• Most burglaries are concentrated in a small area of east Oxford, where there is a large number of multi-occupancy homes. Shared accommodation presents burglars with the opportunity to steal a high volume of portable items such as laptops and mobile phones. Our data suggests that burglars don't tend to target the larger, more affluent residences in the north of the city.
• Burglars tend to commit their crimes in a very small physical area. Our wider research suggests that this is because burglaries tend to be committed by a small number of repeat offenders who are often supporting a drug habit.
• 'Distraction' burglars (who gain entry by distracting the home owner rather than by using force) tend to be carried out by professional criminals. Crime mapping shows that these crimes are concentrated on the edge of the city, where criminals have access to the ring road and can make a quick get-away. This is a typical example of how the police can use crime mapping to establish a particular criminal's 'MO' ('modus operandi', or way of working).

Click here to use the Oxford Crime Map yourself.