rhyme with boris
noris?
doris?
horace?
A test version of the Metropolitan Police crime statistics map has gone online showing crime figures broken down by ward and sub-ward - about every 600 households. A quick search for the Vulture Towers postcode shows we're in a high crime area with 44 crimes in June compared to just 29 in May. Reg staffers were probably not …
It's nice to see that there is zero crime in downtown London. From Temple to the Tower and Beech to Upper Thames I know that I can travel with impunity: fearing neither violent or unpleasant things will happen to me.
God save the Queen and the Met for they provide the peace loving citizens of the Empire with a haven of safety amid the 'High, Above Average, and Average' levels of crime in the surrounding wards.
The Met have had a crime figures website for a while, in fact it's linked as 'Detailed Crime Figures' off the new one. What's new - the whizzy Google maps stuff and the coloured areas for the hard of thinking, plus it goes down to subward rather than ward level. What's missing - quite a lot of types of crime (anything except burglary, robbery and vehicle crime) and per-month comparisons so you can see trends instead of being mislead by statistical spikes from one year to the next (June 2007 had twice as many murders as June 2008, but that doesn't mean the murder rate has halved).
A cursory glance shows that crime is reducing, on the whole, nearly everywhere, but that the 'high' category covers a huge range of possible values. The boundaries are entirely arbitrary, in fact, and some explanation of how they're set would be nice.
The main problem with it is comparing dissimilar areas using the crude measure of crimes per x people - the West End is a crime hotspot on this, presumably because it's got a lot of robbery crimes committed against people who are visiting, rather than locals (pickpocketing, in other words). This skews the figure a bit, because the resident population is relatively low. It indicates a crime problem, but not one that local residents need worry about overly or one that should affect house prices (which are astronomical there anyway).
Also, it's mid-August now, and neither site has figures for July up yet...
Forest
Florist
Chorist
It's a shame it doesn't quite stretch to "embarrassed".
I guess "Forrest Johnson" has a certain something to it, though, a little feather of downy blonde hair blowing past a park bench... "Life is like a.. err.. well... hmmm... life... yes... what was I talking about again? Ah yes! Life... it could be considered shallowly analagous to a.. erm... yes... a box of chocolates. Hand-made belgian ones, obviously- none of that cheap cadburys tat for me!"
Point data (crimes)? Aggregated and classified by completely arbitary boundaries (wards)? Have they ever heard of the modifiable area unit problem (MAUP)?
Given the right boundaries to map by i bet i can make almost any crime cluster in London vanish faster than you can say Home Office Statistics.
Mine's the one with the "Basics of Geographic Information Systems and Cartography" guide in the pocket.
"It's nice to see that there is zero crime in downtown London. From Temple to the Tower and Beech to Upper Thames I know that I can travel with impunity: fearing neither violent or unpleasant things will happen to me."
That's because The City of London (i.e. this area) isn't covered by the Met, but instead the City of London police - so the Met doesn't have the figures.
Does that work?, I always got the impression he was a novice when he talked. Just seemed to be clueless. Of course he could be brilliant - I've never met him, but I just kind of got that "I'm a politician because i'm totally incompetent at anything else and wouldn't survive 10 minutes in industry" vibe. Or well he's not been Mayor long, so still fits.
Paris, because... oh i dunno.