Friday 25 February

This evening, Dimitri presents “more news is bad news?”

Last week the Home Office launched the www.police.uk website. It has is a detailed map with monthly figures on violent crime on every street of England and Wales. The website had 18m hits within an hour.

The launch and was somewhat controversial. The Home Office sees it as a tool of empowerment, which will make policing more transparent and accountable. It gives more information to the public, it argues, and that will make police more responsive.

Criticism however comes from many sides. One argument says that this could have distributional consequences, as home owners might end up being losers. Others contest the policy, arguing that it is just a gimmick, and that it detracts people from the main issues. For example, since the general elections the police force has lost 2,000 officers. Finally, there's some concern around the quality of the information.

In a more general level, critics say that this will actually increase the fear of crime, and that this is undesirable, as such fear is commonly seen as unjustified. Indeed, the CEP published a report

(http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/ea007.pdf) from just before the UK general elections showing that crime in the UK today is nearly half of what it was in 1997, and still people think that crime is rising.

The whole debate around the new website brings a number of questions for discussion.

The first one relates to a recurrent theme in our happy hour

discussions: Can more information hurt, and if it can, what are the possible channels? Can we think here that some cognitive constrains might people lead to misread and misuse this information? If so, should we protect voters (or, more generally, agents) of information overflow?

Or can we think that the release of such information is of a strategic nature, and therefore we shouldn't give it too much credibility? If this government's platform is tackling crime, then don't they want us to believe that crime is a problem? Should we believe them? Do we expect this policy to elucidate the fact that crime has been falling--or will it just reinforce people's beliefs that, yes, there's a lot of violent crime going on? Then the ultimate question becomes, should we protect voters from such strategic release of information, and if so, how?

And finally, don't we know that the news media over reports crime?

Shouldn't the government try to correct such biases, instead of reinforcing them?

I'm a Guardian reader, so unfortunately most of the links (appart from the police.uk website and the CEP report are from there). By the way, there's a piece by a LSE PhD student:

One of the few pieces in favour of the policy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/crime-maps-policing

Simon Jenkins:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/03/crime-map-information-theresa-may

The LSE PhD:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/crime-maps-policing-home-office

One more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/feb/01/crime-maps-too-much-information

And another one:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/feb/10/government-data-crime-maps