Alternate National Crime Mapping

In 2011 the Home Office released the police.uk website which provided a high resolution map of recent crime data for the national extents of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Through this free service, crimes were represented as points plotted on top of a Google map, and visible down to a street level of resolution. However, in order to maintain confidentiality and to comply with data disclosure legislation, individual level crimes were aggregated into points that represented clusters of events that were located over a series of streets, thus creating a spurious level of precision.

This research presented a new method of translating ‘point’ crime events into a new representational form that is tied to street network geography; and presenting these results in an alternate national crime mapping portal www.policestreets.co.uk. 

Singleton, A. and Brunsdon, C. (2014). Escaping the pushpin paradigm in geographic information science: (re)presenting national crime data. Area, 46(3), 294–304.