The Home Office’s new online Crime Map is a step forward in providing the public with information, but it ignores the role of the police, oversimplifies vastly different types of offences and belies crime’s downward trend in recent years

Crime mapping is not new in the UK – so does the new Home Office’s online crime map go one better than those that went before? Daniel Bear looks at the motivation behind the next iteration of local crime maps and finds that while government seeks to encourage people to hold their local police forces to account, they do not give nearly enough information to citizens to allow them to do so.