Home Office
This idea is so good, it’s almost criminal.
The Home Office in the U.K. launched www.police.uk Tuesday, which allows the viewer to see the offenses reported in any street by entering a street name or zipcode. But despite costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop, and being hailed as a “magnificent achievement” by the Association of Police Authorities, there have been some serious teething problems on its debut day. The worst offense? The site has been crashing in light of receiving up to five million hits an hour, or some 75,000 a minute.
(More on TIME.com: The top 10 crime stories of 2010.)
Taking to Twitter, the Home Office wrote: “Hugely popular streetlevel crime maps getting 75,000 hits per minute so you might experience delays. Keep trying.” Users have reported seeing a blank page, or the message “no police area is associated with this address.” When it works, you can supposedly see which crimes have taken place on or near to a specific street over the past month.
The site is split into six categories: burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, violence, other crime and anti-social behavior. Sex crimes are part of the “other” category (as well as theft and shoplifting, which is meant to mean that victims won’t be identified.) According to the maps, streets in Preston (North West England), Swansea (Wales) and the Lakeside shopping mall in Essex (on the outskirts of London), are currently hiding in shame by being named among the most crime-ridden places, each having more than 100 reported crimes in December.
(More on TIME.com: See pictures of the British police.)
While many will welcome the maps, there are salient issues at stake such as whether victims have or should consent to information being used, what this could do to house prices and general uncertainty over the accuracy of certain streets. But these are all moot points if the site doesn’t work: rather ironically, until the problems are solved, you could say that the site has been stolen. (via BBC)