This morning saw the somewhat problematic launch of the National Police Crime Mapping website, the Home Office initiative which aims to give members of the public better access to information about crime in England and Wales. The scheme builds on the local crime mapping sites already available for each individual police force, by now allowing users to compare their area with others across the country, amongst other features and information.

The new national website faced difficulties in the hours after launching, with many people unable to access it — according to a Home Office spokesman this was due to the “high level of public interest” putting “temporary pressure” on the site.

The Home Office was clearly not prepared for the high volume of traffic that the website received, which might be thought strange given the recent case of the swine flu advice website, which crashed shortly after its launch, receiving some 2,600 visits a second. As Steve Mortimore, the deputy chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), said at the national crime website’s official unveiling: “Fear of crime is known to outstrip the reality”. Shouldn’t they have banked on more people anxiously or curiously visiting the site, then?

As Mortimore says, we certainly have a fixation with — and in some cases an inflated perception of — crime in this country. If you believe the figures from the Home Office’s British Crime Survey, which takes into account crimes not reported to the police, our fear of crime far outweighs our likelihood of being a victim of it (see pages 18-21 of THIS DOCUMENT). The media obviously plays a large part in this — crime always makes for an eye-catching story, and it is not surprising, therefore, that most people perceive an increase in crime to be greater at a national level (elsewhere) than in their own area.

Will mapping out national crime levels help to calm excessive fears, and help to prevent it taking place? The scheme has its limitations, in that it only represents crimes recorded by the police, which are considerably lower than those reported to the British Crime Survey. People will usually be affected more powerfully by their own personal experience of crime than what they read, too.

For many people, however, it should be refreshing to learn that their area is actually safer than they believed it to be, and where there are particularly dangerous areas of the country then it is probably a good thing for visitors to be forewarned — this could help to avoid many crimes being committed. But we must also ask what it will do for the morale of those who live and work in such places by officially declaring them high-risk, no-go areas where crime is routine and expected.

In principle, giving the public better access to this information is certainly a positive step - at a time when trust in government and police is low, an open approach is a part of what is needed to restore it. If this scheme can also help to deflate fear of crime where it is unnecessarily heightened, and encourages vigilance where it is warranted, then it must be considered a success.

In the next issue of Total Politics magazine, which comes out this Friday, leading American political strategist Joe Trippi highlights the importance of information and the Internet in the modern political era: “we now have a more involved and perceptive citizenry with immediate access to information and therefore power,” he writes. “This change will drive everything, and you need to understand the implications of it to survive.”

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