Why has this site closed?

The information on crimeinlondon.com was based on police-recorded crime data provided by the Home Office on their police.uk site. To protect crime victims' privacy, this data is anonymised by altering the locations of crimes slightly. I had hoped that, at council-ward level, these alterations would not be significant. However, on too many occasions the anonymisation process caused crimes to appear in one area when they had actually occurred in another. This meant that site visitors were being mislead and was unfair on local police teams who were, in some cases, seeing crime counts on this site that were higher than those that had actually occurred.

The anonymisation problem could have been avoided if the Home Office had provided crime counts for common areas (such as wards) taken before crime locations were altered. I asked for this but was told that it would be too expensive. Some of this information is available from the MPS. Changing the data source would have meant re-writing most of the code behind the site, as well as manually updating the site each month (because the MPS data are only available in Excel format). This would have been very time consuming and would have been vulnerable to the MPS changing its publication policies in future.