Last month the Home Office announced that 'crime maps' would be published for the whole of the UK by the end of this year. The announcement seems to have prompted the full range of reactions, from 'so what?' to 'it won't work' to 'flog them flog them all!'. Actually, not quite the last one... though I have seen a suggestion that it's offenders' home addresses which ought to be mapped.
Many of you will probably remember chicagocrime.org, one of the first things to be labelled as a "mashup". It cross-referenced Chicago PD crime reports with a map and a number of indices like location, crime type and so on. Now, I don't know what effect this has had on crime in Chicago, and I've only ever visited that city once (I thoroughly enjoyed the visit, by the way). What I can say is this; if I were of evil intent, and on my next visit wanted to plumb the various available depths of depravity, the current incarnation of the crime map mashup, called http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/ would give me a pretty good indication of where I would be most likely to find drugs, firearms or prostitutes. At a charitable reading, you could argue that it would tell me where I'd be most likely to get arrested for having anything to do with any of them, but that's another matter...
A BBC piece on the UK plans leads with the question: "will [crime maps] help cut crime, or could they have unforeseen consequences?". I'm not sure about the former, but I think I can guarantee the latter.
After all, who would reason that the introduction of cable TV would lead to an increase in burglaries? There doesn't seem to be much of a connection - but when you think about it, your cable viewing behaviour is logged, and it reveals vastly more about you than your faithful old CRT and aerial ever did. Anyone with access to your cable logs will know if you suddenly stop watching TV in the summer, despite the Olympics, and will probably draw the conclusion that you're away from home. On that basis, who would have foreseen the potential of TiVo as a burglary preventer, rather than a burglary target? (Usual disclaimer, I have no connection with TiVo, commercial or otherwise).
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