FearSquare.com  –  Combining  public  crime  data  with  social  media  services    

Andrew  Garbe+,  Shaun  Lawson,  Ben  Kirman,  Conor  Linehan,  Jamie  Wardman  and  Derek  Foster  

   

Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre University of Lincoln

People can use the application to easily understand the levels of crime in places that they commonly live, travel through, or visit

Allows people to visualize and interact with official UK crime statistics in a way that is specific to their own, individual, everyday life

Provides a platform for research into people’s perception of crime in their life

Police.uk API http://www.police.uk/api/docs/ Allows you to retrieve crime information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces. Data.Gov.Uk http://data.gov.uk/ The Government is releasing public data to help people understand how government works and how policies are made.

Foursquare http://foursquare.com Location based service where you earn awards and badges for ‘checking Into’ places such as your favourite bar, restaurant or hang out place You ‘Check In’ using a mobile app and this data is displayed on foursquare.com and available to your friends

How does it work?

Uses RESTful API calls for data from foursquare and police.uk

Foursquare  Check-­‐ins  and  Gov  Crime  Data  

Public  interest  of  already  available  government  data  

Unfortunately the majority of users are from countries which public crime data is not currently available, or not suitable for this project

Fearsquare usage statistics show that the public are extremely interested in new and exciting visualisations/applications, even if the data is already available elsewhere

IncorporaIon  of  InternaIonal  Crime  StaIsIcs  

FearSquare currently uses UK crime statistics and therefore only provides data on UK foursquare locations We urge EU countries to release their own crime statistics: ONLINE from a LIVE SOURCE in a MACHINE-READABLE format http://www.police.uk/api/docs/ <- Good example of online crime data Importantly crime records should contain the following; Where Crime Location (Latitude/Longitude) What Crime Type (Anti-social, robbery etc.) When Date of reported crime

What  needs  to  be  done  

Developers  need  data  that  is;  ü in  machine  readable  formats  ü available  from  a  well  documented,  live  online  source  

ü in  the  purest  format  ü in  the  finest  granularity  available  ü able  to  be  limited  based  on  parameters  

 

Impacts  of  data  misrepresentaIon  

Developers and data controllers need to be vigilant of how data is presented so as not to cause a detrimental effect on third parties

“@anon – Apparently a branch of Costa Coffee in Cambridge is the most bad-ass place on Foursquare in the UK!”

Great  applicaIons  are  being  made,  but  what's  the  point  if  they  are  not  being  

recognised?  •  Data  controllers  need  to  formulate  a  selecIon  process  which  

will  allow  developers  to  submit  applicaIons  to  a  central  ideas  hub  

•  These  ideas  can  then  be  formally  presented  as  government  backed  applicaIons  for  use  in  the  public  domain  

QuesIons?