Index of Resilence

The picture above which looks like slate flooring is in fact a map of London Boroughs. It comes from an interesting new index commissioned by the BBC and complied by Experian which can be found in it interactive state with background documentation and spreadsheet here. The index ranks the 324 boroughs in England by how resilient they appear to be to Government spending cuts; 1 being the most resilient and 324 the least. It appears to me a wealth index in the broadest sense, that is, not just money. It is a sort of index of multiple non-deprivation. It is of interest to me because it is at borough level, an important operational level of policing and it allows me to compare my borough rankings of policing data with an index that broadly indicates underlying social issues that may affect the nature of the crime and incident demand on police. Unfortunately the multiple index does include some crime elements so it is not totally independent from my data.

Influences on violence

Top 11 days of "violence against the person" incidents in London in 2009

Bottom 10 days of "violence against the person" incidents in London in 2009

Most police officers would agree, I think, that the biggest influence on violence is alcohol. I have used a Met Office website to look at weather conditions in 2009 that can be found here. Weather appears to influence violence through the mechanism of more excessive alcohol consumption, I think, when it is hot. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the peak time for incidents is around midnight. Holidays such as New Year and hot bank holiday weekends that co-inside with half term seem add to the mixture. Halloween and extra hour at night due to changing the clocks also seems to affect things.

There appears to be a background level of violence of about 300 incidents a day (I am sure that 22/6/09 is a data blip due to the computer being out of action for about 16 hours)  that is undeterred by anything including snow.

There is an interesting paper "The influence of weather on local geographical patterns of police calls for service." in Planning and Design 2009 Volume 36 Number 5. This looked at various weather factors and concluded that there was a relationship between weather temperature and disturbance incidents. The methodology looked at the temperature at the time of the incident. From my brief analysis I think that the influence of temperature continues even after it becomes cooler due to the alcohol factor.

Violence in London

I am in the midst of analysing police incident data. I have decided to look at violent crime first.

Let me explain the features of the data set that are relevant to this post. An incident is created from information from a member of the public (or on occasions from police officer information). This is coded to the type of incident. There are about 100 codes that can be used in three fields. When the incident is completed the same codes are used in three fields to result or class the incident.

I am interested in just one of the codes "1" which is "violence against person". I am interested in this analysis of the demand profile so it would be logical to look at the type fields based on what the initial information is. I decided however to base my analysis on the class fields because I think this more accurately reflects the true nature of the incident.

So the incidents I have selected have the number "1" in one of the class fields. This gives me a rich data set of incidents to analyse, and one which I suspect is more reflective of events of violence than the recorded crime data set.

Thumbs up for Safer Milton Keynes

This crime map is part of the Safer Milton Keynes website. It is the best I have seen of the UK type of crime map. It uses Ordinance Survey rather than Google Maps. What I like about it is the way it has good background information about data sources, limitations of the data and the analysis. It integrates council antisocial behaviour with police crime (from the crime reporting system I am assuming).

There are a number of non-standard features about this map though. It is based on Milton Keynes Neighbourhoods and Estates, which as far as I can make out are definitely not co-terminus with Lower Super Output Areas and perhaps not Wards, if grouped; the crime categories are not totally the same as Home Office ones; and I suspect the anti-social behavior categories are also devised locally. I am not going to be critical of this because the categorisations seem better to me and more understandable to the public.

I wonder if they are considering including police incident data.

Shedding more light on the Dark Figure

I will be giving a presentation based on the abstract below at the Crime Survey Users Meeting in London in December.

By the use of victimization survey methodology the British Crime Survey attempts to measure the numbers of different types crimes that have occurred to individuals and households. The statistics produced allow the percentage of crimes that were not reported to and recorded by the police to be assessed.


The presentation will discuss how the British Crime Survey could shed more light on this dark figure. The relevant section in “Crime in England and Wales 2009/10” is 2.5 Reporting Crime.

The discussion will include the following topics;

• Is the methodology for calculating the dark figure correct?
• Should the questions address why people report crime to the police not why they do not?
• Is the dark figure a measure of the level of confidence individuals, groups, communities has in the police and the criminal justice system?

Murder Maps - the best risk assessment aid

I am increasingly liking murder maps. They are simple, straight forward and easy to interpret. They are the quickest way to understand where the safer and less safe neighbourhoods are in major towns. Something that the people who live there probably know but essential risk assessment information for the intrepid traveller.

The first map shows murders in Washington DC, USA 2005-9, the link is here. The designer has helpfully shown which area is included, which means that it is obvious that there are almost no murders west of the Potomac River and many to the east

No murder housing near the Cathedral west of the Potomac River

Many murders housing east of the Potomac River

Its not cricket

We are told that Diana death was accidental, Dr David Kelly's death was suicide and Bob Woolmer's death was by natural causes but many people believe that one or more of these deaths was murder.

Bob Woolmer, for those who do not know, died on 18th March 2007 in his hotel room in Kingston, Jamaica when he was the Pakistan's cricket coach at the Cricket World Cup in the West Indies. His death was investigated as murder with suggestions that it was in some way linked to Asian betting syndicates. Perhaps he had found out that some Pakistan players colluding with the syndicates contributed to Pakistan losing to Ireland the previous day and was going to spill the beans.

I had been following Bob Woolmer's career since the early 1970s because I had been told that he was an old boy from a school I went to in Derbyshire. It appears that this "fact" is actually wrong but it has not meant I did not believe it for about 40 years.

And this is my point - a person's perception is often more relevant and powerful than facts. Fear is based on perception.

The British endearingly often fall into the trap of thinking that because a person speaks English and perhaps plays cricket that they have the same background, attitudes and values as them. The fact is Pakistan is about as different as you get to Britain; crime and the rule of law are a world apart.

Everyone in England seems to assume that the latest cricket betting scandal, this time involving Pakistan, is about individual cricketers making money. What if money is not the primary motivation but fear? Are they seriously advocating banning an 18 year old (probably the best fast bowler of his age in the history of the game) for life because he was probably doing what he was told and feared the consequences if he did not?