SO, the police have launched a website giving information about the crimes which have taken place in every street in the country.

Really? At a time when they are axing 10,000 jobs? I hear you ask.

Whether it is worthwhile use of police time or not – 18 million hits within hours of its launch tells you the public have a real interest in what’s happening on their doorstep.

The frenzy was similar to when Google unleashed its controversial Street View tool.

Again, does that have a value other than allowing people to say, ‘look, there’s my house’ or ‘wish I’d not left the bins out in the front yard that day?’ But the interest levels in both were phenomenal so let’s take a closer look at the imaginatively titled police.uk.

The site is initially very simple – a big white box where you can enter your street, postcode or town.

After entering my address, the contact details for my local policing team come up next to a map pinpointing all the crimes which were recorded in December last year.

Zooming into my street, the data show there were three incidents of anti-social behaviour on my road.

Not much to worry about there.

Scrolling across towards the city centre shows there were a about 200 incidents – mainly anti-social behaviour with about 20 per cent indicating violent crime.

Within a mile radius of the city centre the data says there were a total of 661 crimes – burglary, 24; anti-social behaviour, 345; robbery, 3; vehicle crime, 16; violent crime, 79, and other crime, 194.

Interesting it may be, but what does this information show?

This is just data from one month, is it up or down from the previous month? Or what about the previous year?

Let’s say, for example, there had been a number of burglaries, robberies or violent crimes in my street.

I would want to know exactly what had happened. Had anyone been arrested? If so how are they being dealt with?

Police.uk has replaced the crime mapper tool which already existed on the West Mercia Police website.

While not giving street-by-street figures, it did give detailed crime figures for each policing area.

It also included data from the past three months and gave a comparative figure from the previous year.

The new website was discussed at this week’s West Mercia Police Authority meeting.

Chief Constable Paul West said one of the problems with a national data base like this is that each police force will record crimes differently – particularly anti-social behaviour.

What one force classes as anti-social behaviour another force may decide it is just youngsters hanging around and won’t record it as a ‘crime’.

This was highlighted when authority member Paul Deneen mentioned a local press report which compared the data from a road in Shrewsbury to areas of Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester.

The figures suggested Shrewsbury had the higher levels of crime.

Mr West said: “A lot of the press have been trying to get a story out of it when there isn’t one – using it as a chance to rubbish the figures.

“There are some data quality issues with it but the sheer number of people who logged on shows that the public are interested in this.”

Councillor Sheila Blagg, authority chairman, thinks some of these issues should have been addressed before sending the website live.

She said: “The public are interested, they do want to know, they do need to know about the crime in their area, but we have to go forward with something that is accurate. Perhaps they launched it too soon.”

Mr Deneen also questioned how time-consuming it was to upload the data.

He said: “We can spend a lot of time keeping these things up do date but we have to be choosy about what we do.”

Councillor Robin Bennett agreed.

He said: “There should be no choice between officer time on the street and sitting in front of a PC uploading details to a website.”

But Mr West said the process updating West Mercia’s crime figures to the national website can be done at the push of a button.

Councillor Bernard Hunt said people he had spoken to in Bromyard were pleasantly surprised at the information they found on the website.

He said: “Those I have spoken to have been pleased and astonished at what they found – how little crime there was in their area.

“In some of the villages around Bromyard there was no crime recorded whatsoever. They couldn’t believe there was none in areas where they thought there might be some.”

On the whole, it seems the jury is still out and there may be some fine tuning which needs to be done.

But it is good to see the police being transparent with their data and using the latest technology to make it accessible to the public.