The map is a lie anyway...

There have been 2 murders within 3 houses of mine. No violent crime shows up in my post code. 1 Motorcycle theft, 3 cases of theft from a vehicle, 2 car thefts and a number of burglaries. None of these show up. A couple of assaults and one very high profile of a house leading to numerous arrests on drug and weapon charges. No sign of that either.

And I know that in at least 3 of those crimes, permission was given to include the reports in statistics.

Site doesn't work

Can anyone get the police crime map site to work for anywhere in Scotland? All I get is a message saying "Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search."

Not only...

Why did it cost so much, but who else bid for the work and how did their costs stack up?

"Rock Kitchen Harris"?

Damn. I've only just mastered Paper and Scissors and now they've changed the bloody rules.

Well

I understand that the reasoning behind the gov costings is thus:

1) Never bring it in house, always use a supplier it's easier to blame them when it goes wrong.

2) Suppliers can never have less more 50% of income per annum from UK.gov.

3) Suppliers total income per year must be more than x million.

Which basically mean that the only people who can work with UK.gov are large companies (Siemens, GE, IBM), who's billing practices are always in the realms of fantasy, I'm surprised a piddling ad agency even got a look in.

Government Wake Up

I don't care what flavour of government we have, government departments and IT just don't mix.

Generally speaking, government departments spending big money on big projects just don't mix.

Why they don't mix is because they're not spending their own cash, which by definition wasn't earned by them in the first place.

So, instead of sensibly defining, scoping, budgeting, evolving etc a system fit for purpose, we generally get a committee of incompetents spending an ever ready stream of tax-cash on a half baked idea which someone thought was a good one at the time.

No accountability means no lessons are ever learned either...

Site Errors...

There are a few problems with the cheapie site so I guess you get what you pay for!

On a street where multiple types of crime have occured the pins are stacked such that you cannot access the lower data, They need to combine the types into single pins, and different colours would be useful too. (especially if colours faded based on the mix - ie 2 red +1 blue = magent whereas 2 blue + 1 Red = violet)

Anyway as a developer I have quoted for database jobs and been decliend because I was too cheap! business really does not understand, and government follows where the idiots lead. And on the flip side I've seen stupidly crap products from big companies sell for thousands...

Only scratching the surface

Having worked on a more detailed system for internal use within a UK police force I can say that there a whole heap of other considerations to deal with with respect to the data. For people wondering why a certian crime doesn't appear - there's many reasons why a particular crime might not be shown even if you think you know it ought to exist (e.g.., Rape / child abuse). And you don't know what type of classification is being used to determine the type of crime - is it what it was reported as, is it what the offender has been charged with etc., etc.

And crimes don't happen in a postcode or a ward or a town. They happen at a place (or places). So if they've brought the data at a postcode (and many places don't have a postcode - robbery in a park ?) then it'll be wrong. Consider credit card fraud - where did the crime occur ? Do you take multiple occurences ? or do you consider where the offender(s) were arrested ?

The data we used was down to x/y coords to the nearest meter. It can shown a considerably different view...

Crime in Scotland

There is no crime in Scotland. Only cries of help from the disadvantaged who are trying to address the inequalities of life and create a socialist utopia north of Hadrian's Wall.

And that's why you're not allowed to hit scrotes with a crowbar when they're nicking your car stereo. they're not thieves they're disadvantaged.

Cost

Does the £300k cost include the running costs?

AWS operate a pay-as-you-go policy so with everyone hammering the site at the moment and racking up the requests, I wonder if the dev company will be submitting another bill very soon!

Anyway, the gov should have just given the data and setup a backend for querying the data, and left the frontend mashup to a member of the public who would have sorted it out eventually.

Ahhhh... but then the gov/police don't get to take the glory of the launch of a new site!

Do I get a tax refund? Since there's not been any crimes or a police human in the small village where I live for over 10 years.

Thought they had already done this

I was able to pull up the crime stats of my london area few years ago, so why they couldn;t of been expanded as exactly the same thing I dont know. Maybe it was. But having a site able to handle the DDOSing from the entire UK+externals is somewhat crazy, hell even banks can't handle all there customers comming to there branch's at once so when a website fails to do so then who's supprised.

One question I do have is that why couldn't this of been open sourced. Hell why dont the goverment do a website of projects that need doing and open that up fully to the public to see whats being done in there name. Until then we will get reactinary solutions to premptable problems.

Also why oh why do goverments use ad agencies when the content there getting out there does its own ruddy advertising - it's like having a marketing stratergy to advertise a tax increase of 2.1% when if you just did it then the tax incrase would be 2% and the press would advertise it for you for free, papers and news are good for that, use them as they certainly know how to use you :|.

Personaly I find the whole goverment thing curious as party A comes in sells of lots of income avenues to private sector allowing private sector to rape the public then party B comes in and picks up that mess then makes there own legacy mess for party A to come in and repeat the vicious circle. If something is profitable then why give it away. Also when siad percieved improvment's in private sector are based upon private sector overcharging the customer then one has to ask what the hell they are smoking as I personaly think its more a danger to this country than crack and thats illegal.

In further news Mr smith reported 297 dog offences in the street he is going to buy his new house which shockingly enabled him to save money and once he moved the reports of dog offences dropped to zero. It will happen.

ANON before I'm data mined by open source :D

why did it have to cost so much?

Well all those back-handers and "encouragement" to directors on the boards of the vendors, don't come cheap you know!

@ AC - 15:07 GMT "Is it really that expensive?"

Who cares? I made no reference to wanting any irrelevant price comparisons. But by all means, you waste your time on that if you want - not a sockpuppet for RKH are you?

The point is that we are now supposed to be living under a "transparent" government. So the question is quite valid.

Thanks.

Not that much

It's quite sad really but when I hear £300k and government IT project I actually feel like it's a bargain :/

Home Office/ACPO looking after their friends at Rock Kitchen Harris?

Was this effort even put out for tender?

Quite honestly the data presentations are boring - as if it is a web version Power Point. The Register had a piece on the CEO of the company who does the mapping as used in Twitter - those presentations would be much exiting to look at than boring numbers.

I put in Stonehenge as a location and it offered me two police services (forces suggest violence as used on students). I then put one in each window and then the wondrous cloud based service simply provided some hypnotic rotating icons.

Very disappointing, but should we expect better from Plod + Rock Kitchen Harris + Amazon?

P.S. I just tried 10 Downing Street (SW1A 2AA) - the Plod site just did it's circular trick. (I thought a telephone tapper was located there during December)

same thing with direct gov if I remember correctly

I can not remember the figures, but at the time the 'govt' took ages and spent millions, going over time and budget on it, whereas a 'bored' student produced a similar site in 2 hours which only cost a packet of biscuits ! :) (bascily just re branded google, but the results where the same :) ), proved a point though.

err... £300k isn't that bad.

I mean they had to take the data out of the police forces' databases (which will vary hugely in quantity and quality of data stored as well as in the formats (and even whether or not they're IN a standard format) used.). Have you looked at the data behind this? It'd actually be NICE to work with. None of that "human typing error" or numbers-in-a-plain-text crap that you get with a lot of "evolved" systems.

Yes, you can write a program that creates a KML based on a basic dataset in a night. Even updating once a month to get the latest and greatest data would be a night or two's work at most.

But a good chunk of that money would have been earned raking through the various databases and pulling together the required data. It even pulled out data from the Welsh- can you imagine how difficult it must be to make sure it's valid?!

Saying that, I do agree with the other calls for a totally transparent "dumping" of historical police (and other government) data. If they released periodic updates as torrents followed up by hosting the "newest" data on the Amazon cloud then we'd all be able to piece together programs and websites that interrogated this data to give us the information that we wanted.

Rock Kitchen Harris

Sounds like a child's game played with their hands...

Doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on

I'm really having trouble seeing the value of this. It shows a handful of incidents of "antisocial behaviour" in this area and even though "crimes are mapped to an anonymous point on or near the road where they occurred" there are no burglaries near here on the map even though I know of at least 2.

Alternative site is cool

So far Manchester postcodes in M34 has been in Japan and south Africa. The South African authorities don't seem to have provided any crime data for some reason.