When looking at the Met map, it strikes me that there is no part of London that is 'below average' or 'low' crime-rated. Surely there must be somoe, otherwise, how do you compute the average.. Starts to sound very much like the 'be afraid, very afraid' thread-level on the DHS website, doesn't it?

AC because you never know...

I've just lambasted silicon.com for piss poor reporting/article writing on the same story. Their article makes you think you'll get the same loverly graphical overlay that the Met offers.

Has anyone found a list of all 43 links? The Home Office press release is next to useless as it doesn't link to a single one. There doesn't seem to be any central website for the initiative. I've been trying to find the crime maps for Hampshire & Isle of Wight but their website www.hampshire.police.uk doesn't mention the existence of such a thing.

provided your community accurately lines up with the reporting boundaries. having viewed my local forces website I see that certain areas have markedly above average crime numbers but I am concerned that the area affected includes a large stretch of open water and marshland and the beach and inshore waters out beyond the end of the pier.*

I suspect pirates must be operating in these areas and I am taking appropriate precautions.

*that's Breydon Water and Great Yarmouth beach respectively

"Surely there must be somoe [sic], otherwise, how do you compute the average.."

Uhhhm, could it be that it's a, y'know, national average? There are some quite nice places to live beyond the Watford Gap, honest. (Well, beyond Falkirk at least...)

(Why do I fear that this assumption is about to be contradicted and leave me with egg/face interface?)

Just took a look at my area, which flags as average for everything except Anti-Social behaviour which is flagged high.....with exactly 0 cases reported in the stats they show! How the hell can that be high compared to the rest of North Yorkshire?!?!?!?

http://www.hantsiowcaddie.gov.uk/caddie-2/portal

Not mentioned at all on Hampshire Police's website. Ho-hum.

Re: Well done El Reg, the police forces have based their data on Ordnance Survey maps, and as such would be breaking their license by publishing it on some fancy Google mashup or the like. Apparently the Met are on shaky ground, legally.

Thats where bixton is.

For the Thames valley it is located here http://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/Instant-atlas/atlas.html And as I suspected in my town I live in the shit part :-(

Just what you need when selling your house lol!

People caught looking for hookers, photographing stuff, looking at children, owning a knife or handling extreme porn.

According to http://northants.crimemapper.co.uk/ I live in a relatively high-crime area, and yet our house insurance is rock bottom because we actually live on a low-crime street.

It seems the police site for northants is based on wards, and that doesn't work because I live in a ward that contains the town centre. Our street is only one row of houses away from town-centre hotspots, and the the average crime rate is dragged way up by all the trouble caused by boozed up "publican's friends", and boy racers being twonks in the local car park. But because we're insulated, and not on a rat-run, we get nothing. The only crime we've had is the alleged BNP member's house up the road being egged.

Is down for maintenance already. Is EDS involved or has Brunstrom set fire to the headquarters after climbing through a window again? :o)

http://www.north-wales.police.uk/nwpv2/en/error.htm (Honestly, it really does link you to an error page from the main site http://www.north-wales.police.uk/nwpv2/en/home.asp)

Fire, just because...

I was immensely gratified to find out we have these in the US already, and besides the boring stuff like "I wonder why this house is so cheap in this brand new city I've never lived in before, could it be that it's in a bad area and I should hesitate to buy it?" there are distinct advantages to knowing what sorts of crimes are most predominant in your various neighbourhoods.

For example, feel like hiring a hooker? No problem, just check out the crime map and you can see that prostitution is rife in these areas. Fancy some pot or maybe some meth amphetamine? I see from my menu, err I mean map, that the area north of the river is the best place to score.

So you see, there are advantages to knowing what sorts of crimes are committed in which areas and how frequently.

So can you use this service to find the best places for hookers (non-pimped, obviously) or weed?

Apart from being impossible to find - Extensive Googling returned nothing and the HantsPlod website was equally useless - the only way of finding the data was from an earlier posting here on El.Reg by Ian Ferguson.

And the map itself?

As much use as Anne Franks drum kit.

"the definition of what constitutes a crime is in a seemingly constant state of flux."

My understanding is that under the benign leadership of She-who-shall-not-be-named, HM Gov are going to trash all existing criminal legislation and replace it with a new, all-encompassing Criminal Act: "Sec 1. Everything you do is a crime. Sec. 2. Citizens are required to maintain a log of all crimes they commit and provide it to law enforcement officers, council snoops, and assorted busybodies whenever demanded."

N.B. "Demanded", not "requested." If it's going to be a jack-booted police state, let's make sure there are hobnails involved.

I wonder which clown is putting the GMP web site together. Some of the coppers' mug-shots are 4 megapixel, <2MB images scaled to 108 × 144. For fuxsake...

Because all the other Tykes are exceptionally polite and social, scoring negative. Your use of a mild epithet, "hell" has raised your area's score to zero.

You've only got yourself to blame.

Seem to be quite on the ball with this, lots of clicking required, but it appears to work, and was found from the front page quite easily

http://www.myneighbourhood.info/myn2/html/home

No joy from the Lancashire plod website. Seems to take me on the proverbial goose chase around outdated minutes and PACT meeting notices.

Well, either someone is not counting right or theres a mayor problems in my town. Looking at my Beds, Arlessey maps, it shows an increase of 100% in both Robbery and 100% Violent Crimes compared to last year.

nice one, now im really scared.

...on the Avon and Somerset version you get a little warning saying "Internet Explorer may perform slowly with crime statistic, it is recommended that you Firefox or Chrome.

Lincolnshire Police's website helpfully includes not only a link to its own crime maps (http://lincspolice.crimemapper.co.uk), but also links to crime maps for neighbouring forces.

How is anti-social behavior a crime?

So I went to my local police map, typed in my postcode, got a naff map and some figures that said some types of crime had gone up and some have gone down, and then I was filled with a feeling that I couldn't quite describe. Was it apathy; was it disinterest; was it antipathy? I wasn't sure quite what I was feeling so I checked the press release. Empowerment - that's it, I'm empowered now. I feel so empowered I think my head is going to explode. I feel like I'm in a dilbert cartoon. I think I'll have to go and lie down for a bit I'm until the empowered-ness wears off.

Mines the cloak of empowerability...

Direct Links to Crime Maps where available:

http://www.crimemaps.org.uk/