The Innovation Award Shortlist

Crime Mapping Team, Home Office and National Policing Improvement Agency

The Home Office has transformed the way that the public can engage with the police and hold them to account. Previously bureacratic, top-down performance approaches and targets were used to hold the police to account. These had little resonance with the public and crime rates at a local, force-wide or national level often meant little to local communities.

The Home Office, with the National Policing Improvement Agency, changed this and has now made England and Wales the most transparent country in the world on crime data. In January 2011, the new police.uk website was launched showing for the first time ever, anywhere in the world, the crimes that were happening on streets across the whole country. Within the first hour of launch the site showed what a massive step up from business as usual the approach was – attracting more hits than the previous site had ever had in its entire history (it only showed crimes at a neighbourhood level).

To date there have been over 420 million hits and the British Crime Survey showed that in the first months alone the equivalent of 3.3 million people had accessed it. It has now laid the platform for a complete change of relationships between the public and the police, with transparency at its heart. It has re-defined the notion of ‘localism’ in the police down to the street level and has already begun to change public behaviour reporting crime and engaging with the police.