New crime maps from ACT Policing

breda said :

Another first for ACT Policing’s intrepid PR team, most of whom must have left school at age 13 after repeating Year 5 several times. Mis-spelling the name of the Minister’s home suburb is a spectacular own goal, even for them.

See the post on the Narrabundah unit fire for an unintentionally hilarious howler, interspersed with the usual sub literate sludge. Truly, someone there must have not just the colour photos, but the video and stereo soundtrack safely cached to still be in that job.

I’m pretty sure it would be a breach of somebody’s Human Rights if you were to point out that they are an incompetent halfwit unsuited to the position they are occupying.

#16
yellowsnow9:22 pm, 24 Feb 12

when i saw a story about this on the ABC news, they showed Simon Corbell at the Canberra show with coppers standing next to a map like the one above – except instead of ‘Weston Creek’ the map had ‘Western Creek’!

Corbell (a resident of WC) looked fairly displeased to say the least! How such a major spelling error could have been allowed to happen is disturbing given the police hierarchies involved (the maps must have gone through a v complex approval process before release).
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Another first for ACT Policing’s intrepid PR team, most of whom must have left school at age 13 after repeating Year 5 several times. Mis-spelling the name of the Minister’s home suburb is a spectacular own goal, even for them.

See the post on the Narrabundah unit fire for an unintentionally hilarious howler, interspersed with the usual sub literate sludge. Truly, someone there must have not just the colour photos, but the video and stereo soundtrack safely cached to still be in that job.

Even if I select the final quarter of last year, the text under the map informs me that the source of the data is:
ACT Policing PROMIS and Autocite as of 4 July 2011

Now, as much as I have big problems with systems which predict crimes, if the Police have such systems, shouldn’t they be attending the crimes scenes before people turn up to commit the crimes?

when i saw a story about this on the ABC news, they showed Simon Corbell at the Canberra show with coppers standing next to a map like the one above – except instead of ‘Weston Creek’ the map had ‘Western Creek’!

Corbell (a resident of WC) looked fairly displeased to say the least! How such a major spelling error could have been allowed to happen is disturbing given the police hierarchies involved (the maps must have gone through a v complex approval process before release).

Interesting to note that it didn’t take long for the ACT Policing website to be amended to. Corbell must have had a very terse word to someone that’s for sure.

To use this kind of information, you need to know the suburb’s background. Say for example there are a lot of assaults in Mitchell – well, it has a juvenile detention centre, so it would be no surprise. As a mainly industrial suburb, it has a very small residential population, making rates per head of population astronomically high.

Drug seizures in Hume? Try the car park at the prison.

Car thefts from Pialligo? Well, we leave cars parked there for weeks at the airport (though actually, the airport seems to be excluded from the map), and almost no-one lives there.

Assaults in Civic? Well, it’s full of intoxicated people after dark, and again few people live there so the rates per population are really high.

Single incidents can also have a big effect – vehicle-related deaths in Fyshwick – MULLY!

Statistics aren’t facts – they need interpretation.

For crimes of low frequency, being able to aggregate quarters to years or multiple years would be good, but I coudn’t work out how to do that.

Here endeth the patronising lesson.

IP

drfelonious said :

I missed the homicide in Holder that is listed as having occurred in 2011? No reference to it in a search of Google or even on this site.

if you look at the ACT policing definition of homicide on the mapping tool, you’ll see homicide includes murder, manslaughter and attempted murder. There was an axe wielding man around in Holder last year that got shot in the leg by police (and survived). Maybe he (or the person he was threatening to axe, presumably his partner) was the one ‘homicide’ statistic. I’m vaguely aware of another ‘incident’ in the suburb, but ultimately it was determined there were no ‘suspicious circumstances involved’ (police lingo for suicide)

Wow, Acton trumps most suburbs i plugged in. I suspect that has something to do with it’s distance from the city.

Wow, an entire press-release in Gill Sans, that’s bold!

Its no wonder not many people live in Hume or Mitchell

The rates per 1000 population are:
Incident type Mitchell Hume
Homicide 0.00 0.00
Assault 2800.00 3500.00
Sexual assault 200.00 500.00
Offences against a person 0.00 0.00
Burglary 4400.00 6250.00
Robbery 200.00 0.00
Theft (excluding Motor Vehicles) 10200.00 11750.00
Motor vehicle theft 1800.00 1500.00
Property damage 7200.00 9000.00
Other offences 17200.00 23000.00
Traffic Infringement Notices 78000.00 131000.00
Road fatality 0.00 0.00
Road collision with injury 800.00 1250.00

Surely Rates per Area would be more appropriate

So my brief analysis suggests Forest, Chapman/Duffy, Macquarie and Macarthur are, relative to population, the lowest crime areas. But with O’Malley/Isaacs taking first prize