Election 2017: A local study of crime

Posted on by mhannagan

I happen to be, on Facebook, member of two groups: One about Brighton, where I first arrived in the UK in 1984, and one about Hemel Hempstead, the town where I have lived since 1993. You could not think of two more different places. Brighton is lefty, deprived and interesting, whilst Hemel is quite conservative, relatively affluent and hard-working.

The Facebook pages reflect this. On the Hemel one, people are regularly complaining about bikes and scooters being stolen, along with regularly heated debates between the Conservative, DailyMaily, Flog’em and Hang’em members and the small but resolute core of Left-leaning, liberal people. It’s a great way of looking beyond your ‘bubble’.

The rather frequent complaints about bike thefts led me to procure some crime data – a great repository of this exists at data.police.uk, so i thought it would be useful to plot this on a map and see if there is a problem with bike theft in my hard-working, nuttily conservative town. As a background canvas, I am using deprivation data to identify areas which are more or less subject to crime, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation data for 2015, which can be found here.

The data is for February 2017. The background deprivation colour scheme goes from green (no big issue with crime) to red (rather more crime).

Do you think bike theft is Hemel Hempstead’s biggest crime issue ? Let’s see…

Bicycle Theft
Bike Thefts. Some, but no epidemic…
Drugs
Hard-working little town – no time for drugs (or very good at not getting caught).
Robbery
Robberies are not an issue, apparently.
Vehicle Crime
Having two more wheels than a bike increases criminality. Vehicle crime is more prevalent.
Criminal Damage and Arson.PNG
Ah. A bit more serious, criminal damage and arson. Not so good.
Weapons
Rather too many weapons for my liking.
Violence and Sexual
This is no laughing matter. What is going on ?

And there you have it – a snapshot of the criminal landscape in the town where I live. As usual with such investigations, many questions arise:

  • How does that look plotted over time ? (I have the data, watch this space).
  • What does my MP think about it ?
  • Why are there clusters of violence in certain residential areas ?
  • How does my town compare to other similar towns ?
  • How does the police cope with this workload ? It’s a lot of crime…

Finally, should this be an election issue for the people of Hemel Hempstead ? According to the Facebook page and the local paper, it’s all about bad parking, bike thefts and foxes in gardens.

More maps and questions to come, I think.

(Commercial Message 🙂 )

I have used, as promised, the excellent map layers feature of MicroStrategy 10.7. The background deprivation layer is based on Local Super Output Area (Census sub-division) shapefile, the crime layer uses the February 2017 data from the Hertfordshire Constabulary).