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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despite??
Posted by Richard Veryard on August 27, 2008 at 01:40 AM GMT+00:00 #
Joking aside, the concept of the mashup is closely linked with the concept of "repurposing" data - in other words, finding new (and therefore "unforeseen") uses for available data.
So for example, instead of speculating that the distribution of crime could be statistically correlated with the distribution of cable networks, a person with no knowledge of statistics could create a mashup to produce the illusion of a strong link.
However, criminals and estate agents don't always need accurate results - there is often some advantage in simply improving the odds in your favour.
***
One of the dangers of the mashup is that repurposing takes data out of context and may produce misleading results. As the BBC article points out, many crimes are discovered (and therefore located for reporting purposes) at police stations, and therefore police stations are shown as hotspots in the crime maps.
Further distortions are indicated in the comments below the BBC article. Downing Street is a hot spot (of course) but not the City of London (where the crimes associated with owning a bank, more significant than the crime of robbing a bank according to one of Brecht's characters, might be located).
Posted by Richard Veryard on August 27, 2008 at 02:27 AM GMT+00:00 #
What are the (unintended) consequences of making this kind of information available?
Some people worry that clever criminals will target previously low-crime areas, thus distributing crime more evenly across the country. (As if criminals didn't already know where the hot spots were. The reasons why crime is geographically clustered are complex, and cannot be explained purely because criminals lack information or intelligence.)
Who benefits from predictable crime-clustering? The police (who can target resources) and the affluent (who can afford to live in low-crime areas).
So who benefits from a more random distribution? Criminals and the poor?
One comment to the BBC article suggests that estate agents also benefit, but this is surely incorrect. Estate agents (collectively) lose more from being completely unable to sell houses in high-crime areas than they gain from marginal advantages of selling houses in low-crime areas. Like criminals, estate agents aren't primarily competing with each other - they are fighting against fundamental economic forces.
To the extent that making this kind of information available changes the distribution of crime, it is a form of social engineering.
Posted by Richard Veryard on August 27, 2008 at 03:04 AM GMT+00:00 #
Hi, Robin and Richard. Stephen D. Levitt's book, "Freakonomics" talks about correlations like this. If you haven't read it, it's a great read.
Posted by Carolyn on August 27, 2008 at 12:59 PM GMT+00:00 #