Tag Archives: Police

Cutting a police bike up

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is seldom a good idea..

I stuck the flip camera out to record the Tour of Britain as it went past this lunchtime. If you look top left ish, you will see a black car turning left on to the main road. The driver had been stopped once by the police who were closing the road for the riders. Rather than wait she turned off the road, turned around to come back out and go back in the direction she had come from.

Unfortunately she didn’t see the police bike until it was too late…

I’m not sure if it was just his jovial demeanour being of Scottish decent or if he was just annoyed.

Posted from Stoke-on-Trent, England, United Kingdom.

UK Street Level Crime Mapping Goes Live

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This post is shamelessly taken from somewhere else and expanded slightly.

This morning, well last night actually, www.police.uk went live.

Police.uk allows you to look at crime data by place name postcode or address, so really handy if you are looking to move, but also quite a handy content idea for your Hyperlocal site. It can also give a maybe unfair view of an area.

By entering a postcode you get several views available:

Overview

Just that, an overview on one page that shows you the local policing unit, along with, phone number, E-mail address and pictures of the officers & PCSOs (if they are available from the force site). A twitter feed from the force, a crime map, details of the next event in the area sucha as PACT meetings, and links to the main force site, micro-sites, FaceBook etc.

Crime Maps

A nice interactive Google map with all the crime mapped for you. Each pin is clickable and give you information about the crime, obviously no personal details are given and the map point is only so accurate. You can drag the pin around to get the data in a 2.5k radius from a particular point, your house, your school, office etc. You can then select different types of crime and look at those in isolation. It is a real shame you can’t then embed this map on your own site or even grab a link to it.

Meet The Team

A bigger version of the NPU information on the overview page, this shows all the NPU officers with contact details, a map showing the NPU area and the station they work from. This is driven from the local forces, so some are better than others.

Get Involved

Again an expanded version of the information available on the overview page with details of meetings and events.

Information & advice

Links out to other resources about minimising the risk of crime etc.

Other stuff

Data, you can download the data sets from. Data  is available by street or neighbourhood for each force.
Data by neighbourhood will give you a csv with these headings:

  • Month
  • Force
  • Neighbourhood
  • All crime and ASB
  • Burglary
  • Anti-social behaviour
  • Robbery
  • Vehicle crime
  • Violent crime
  • Other crime

Data by street gives you:

  • Month
  • Reported by
  • Falls within
  • Easting
  • Northing
  • Location
  • Crime type
  • Context

All the data is licensed under the Open Government Licence.  I’m going to play with the CSV files later today to see what I can make, as I’m pretty sure many others will be doing today. As @stef has just pointed out you can hack the URL to pull the data for a lat long pair without downloading the data set.

Apps, not really apps, just a link to the mobile site www.police.uk/m/ which will use the GPS location  data from your phone. You can suggest ideas and grab an API key to make your own applications using the data. For some reason, you have to wait to be approved before you get your API key. I’m not sure if they will link to any apps created to use their data on here eventually or just any ‘official’ ones.

My Thoughts

It is a good start, the website is easy to use for people of all abilities and the raw data is available to play with for the more technically minded.

On the down side the data looks like it will be released in batches monthly, I am assuming that the data will only be released for mapping at a certain point in the investigation and not ‘as it happens’.   There are no RSS feeds or embed me links for anything. It would be really nice if you could grab the map for your town, village NPU etc and stick it in your hyperlocal site directly. I’m sure it will only be a matter of time, days or possibly hours, before we see different uses of the raw data emerging using the  tools available on-line.

The biggest drawback I have found is that you can only have the data on the site by NPU, you can’t filter it by station, town or even a division, nor can you do it by the whole force. I would like to see all the crime for the Stoke-on-Trent Division of Staffordshire Police, if I use ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ as a search term I get given the data for the NPU for Hanley, which is the city centre for Stoke-on-Trent.

There have been some people out on the interwebs, complaining about the reported £300,000 it cost to develop the site, as this flies in the face of true open data. I can see the point but I think £300k is a small amount to pay but it does give a stable base for the casual user and a repository for the data sets. Developers & code monkeys can now do the real open data stuff and create stuff from the data sets.

As I say it is a good start and very local but with a few more hours of development on the site they could have done a lot more with the data for the casual user. If I were scoring the site I think a deserved 7/10 from me.

Posted from Atherstone, England, United Kingdom.

#askthecommander

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Tonight I facilitated the first on-line meeting for Staffordshire Police.

Dave Bailey, the divisional press officer for Stoke-on-Trent, and I first spoke about the Ask The Commander idea about 3 months ago. The idea was just to get a senior officer on-line  in to a meeting space to answer questions as they would if they were sitting in a community hall. At the time Dave didn’t have any agreement from a senior officer to take part in this, just the idea that it was something that should be tried.

Once Dave had got the agreement of the ‘senior officer’, who happened to be the Divisional Commander for Stoke-on-Trent, Chief Superintendent Bernie O’Reilly, we set a date and time and decided on the platform, which was CoverIt Live.

The plan was simple, the ‘meeting’ would be published on hyperlocal websites around Stoke-on-Trent so that it had more of a community feel about it than if the police ran it on their site. This also reduces the inevitable read tape that you get with large organisations such as the police. The only other requirement was that the meeting had to be run from a Police facility, to allow for data and and answers to questions to be found quickly and accurately. The one thing we didn’t want was the, ‘thank you for your question, we will look in to it and get back to you’. The meeting needed to be productive and positive.

Using CoverIt Live as a platform deals with all the publishing and hosting issues for you, it provides embedding codes for publishing on may different platforms and allows for a permanent archive of the event. he downside of it is, it doesn’t work well with the standard Government approved installations of Internet Explorer 6 so this needed to be factored in to the plans.

On the night we all went to Hanley Police Station got ourselves in one room with a number of computers on the police netowork and a couple of laptops on 3G connections that would allow us to manage the event. The team consisted of:

  • Chief Superintendent Bernie O’Reilly
  • Dave Bailey – Press Officer
  • Don Knapper – CPS
  • Chief Inspector Geoff (sorry didn’t get his surname)
  • Me

Chief Superintendent Bernie O’Reilly & Don Knapper were the public face of the meeting and the ones who were going to be answering the questions. Dave was going to deal with questions by E-mail which we had loaded in to CoverIt Live so they could be dropped in while the questions asked in the meeting were being answered (Bernie admits his typing isn’t the quickest), Geoff was there to check information and get answers. My role in all of this was to just keep an eye on how things were going, keep everyone calm, take some pictures and make sure that there were no major problems.

The meeting pulled in 62 people in the hour that we were answering questions which is roughly 3 times as many as would be expected at a ‘normal’ police meeting.

All in all we all felt the meeting went well and think that it should be done again in the near future. There are quite a lot of things that could be refined for next time and we have learnt a few things. If it were to be a regular event and once everyone gets more comfortable with the software I would say that it would become a lot slicker and quicker.

Everyone who turned up at the meeting thought it was positive

It will never replace the face to face meetings but it could be used to get more senior officers in to conversations with the public. The next thing I would like to try is running a CoverIt Live meeting along side a regular police meeting.

There is a lot more to this that I will write up in the next day or so.

Knock Knock

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Last Wednesday morning I was lucky enough to be invited out on a drugs raid by Staffordshire Police Press Office.

I had been speaking to Dave the press officer for some time, building a relationship with him and keeping him in the loop with the work we do over on Pits n Pots. On Monday I got a voice mail from him asking me if I was available on Wednesday morning as he ‘might have something that will interest me’. I called back and was told the be at Burslem police station at 7:30 as we were going out on a drugs raid.

So Wednesday morning came and bright and early I got to Burslem where I met up with a reporter and photographer from the Sentinel who were also coming out on the raid. We all met up with Dave and were given bits of paper to sign to indemnify the police, if it all went wrong. Then we got in to one of the 10 or so cars that were going out and headed off in convoy.

The convoy of mainly unmarked cars headed off just before 8am, working their way across town managing to stay together in the rush hour traffic. There were a few stops along the way as the convoy sorted itself out in to the right order. It was interesting the way they managed to stay grouped together, the driving technique wasn’t aggressive and there weren’t any blue lights, just very simply, if there was a gap in traffic the lead car would go and the rest would follow. I assume that the people who were being pulled out on, saw officers wearing body armour in the cars and decided against using their horns to show displeasure.

It was only when we were in the car with Dave, that we were told we were going up to Chell Heath and told not to ‘tweet’ it just yet. We were told that 5 warrants were going to be executed simultaneously and we were going to one street where two properties were going to be raided, giving us a better chance of some photo opportunities. Other instructions were, don’t get in the way, don’t get involved in anything, all officers faces and those of anyone arrested must be masked in the pictures.

We arrived at our ‘targets’ and all piled out of the cars just around the corner. We followed the police as the jogged up the road splitting in to two teams ready to execute their warrants.

Police making their way to 2 target properties

From getting out of the car and the first front door being ‘opened’ was just under 30 seconds,

Getting ready to 'open' the front door

the second door, which was a little further up the road and took slightly longer top open, but was done in less than 50 seconds.

Police Officers Forcing Entry In To A Property

Knock Knock

Out of the two houses I saw being raided, neither of them had any drugs in them and no arrests were made. I asked about the damage to the doors, as you can see they are hardly in any fit state to be re-used, seeing as no drugs were found.

Front door, slight damage.

Dave, told me that the property owners will have to pay for the repairs, the police will contact a boarding up contractor or the local authority to secure the property, but as an investigation has been carried out to gather information & evidence of suspicion of criminal behaviour at the property and the weight of this was strong enough to get a magistrate to sign the warrants, so therefore it is the responsibility of the property owner to make good the damage.

The other 3 raids proved to be more fruitful with the final tally for the day being 6 arrested, 4 male & 2 female. £150,000 of class A drugs and 1 firearm recovered. 3 people appeared in court the following day.

One thing that did strike me as the raids were taking place, the lack of people watching or curtains twitching. By the very nature of the the method of entry it is not quiet, it is designed to be quick and effective and is noisy. A couple of coppers banging at your door with a large chunk of metal should wake you, and your neighbours, up.  After both the properties had been entered and were secured I had a look around the street and there was nobody as far as I could see at any of the windows or outside. It was a couple of minutes later when the flag had gone up and the police van had backed down the road, that people started to appear.

Operation Nemesis Flag

Operation Nemesis Flag

I’d like to think that if something like this was going on across the road from me, that I would hear it. Maybe not, maybe it is a lot quieter than I thought it was. Whatever, it was an interesting few hours with the police and a great result for them. Hopefully I’ll get to see it again sometime. I’m grateful to Dave from Staffordshire Police Press Office who managed to arrange this for me.