Police say cyber crime data could be added to police.uk map

Police have raised the prospect of adding cyber crime data to the online crime map introduced so successfully earlier this year on the Home Office's police.uk web site.

Speaking at the London Conference on Cyberspace last week was chair of the police.uk delivery board and policing, policy and practice service director at the National Policing Agency, Steve Mortimore.

He explained that the site, which has racked up over 430 million page hits since launch, has shown the "huge public appetite" for "this sort of information".

"Although there's nothing planned at present in our dialogue with government ministers it would be possible for cyber crime to be shown on our web site as a separate category," he said.

"We could profile cyber crime to street level, it would be victim based and anonymised...but it's something that could be considered."

However, there are some issues about how to define cyber crime and what would the source of the crime data would be, he added.

It may not be feasible at the moment to get accurate stats on cyber crime, but if the suggestion eventually turns into reality it could help get the message out about the extent of cyber crime and remind the public to remain vigilant online.

Cyber crime has for so long been considered a white collar crime and not even really worthy of investigation, on a small scale, by the police that the fact they are even talking about including this kind of information in their open data drive is encouraging.

Visually representing this kind of crime on a map would be another welcome step on the road to restoring some kind of parity with more traditional crime.

08 Nov 2011