The Home Office said this afternoon the number of hits on its new online crime maps had surged to 18 million an hour as the website crashed repeatedly.

The department blamed "temporary" technical problems on the unexpected level of demand from residents seeking to discover the levels of crime and antisocial behaviour in their area.

The detailed maps, published for the first time today, provide a monthly snapshot of crime and antisocial behaviour on every street across England and Wales.

Nick Herbert, the minister for policing and criminal justice, denied there were technical problems when he was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but by mid-morning the Home Office conceded many were struggling to access the site.

By mid afternoon, the Home Office gave an updated figure of 300,000 hits per minute, or 18m an hour, with the site still appearing to be frozen by early evening.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the department was "delighted" at the level of interest in the new information being provided online. "This is a temporary problem and we are working hard to fix it and hope to have the website back up shortly," she said.

Herbert has hailed the publication of the maps, which are accessible by typing a postcode into the police.uk website, as a "very important step in accountability and transparency", which he said could help ensure the police is responsive "to what the local community wants".

Home Office ministers say it is unprecedented for such interactive crime maps to be published for an entire country and that it has been done without compromising the privacy of victims and witnesses, or having a negative effect on house prices.

The maps also provide contact details for neighbourhood policing teams, information about forthcoming beat meetings, CCTV footage of local incidents, and in some cases even a Twitter feed from beat officers.

Quarterly crime statistics have been available online at ward or local police division level for some time, but the £300,000 project launched today gives information about different types of crime and, for the first time, incidents of antisocial behaviour down to street level.

The maps give street-by-street results for six types of offence, including burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, violence, and antisocial behaviour. Sexual offences are included in "other crime" to avoid revealing the location of victims.

Herbert said the introduction of crime-mapping on this scale was the second major element in the coalition's police reform plans to improve accountability, alongside the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners.

Herbert, an advocate of street-level crime-mapping after studying its success in Los Angeles, said there was "huge interest" among people wanting to know what is happening in their neighbourhood.

While national crime statistics could be quite meaningless, it was "very relevant" to know there was a spate of burglaries in your area and then find out what's being done about it, he said.

"I think we are putting power in the hands of people by giving them the information but, more than that, we are also giving them information about what they can do."

He added that the maps could help to achieve a "connection" between the police and the public.

"The police rely on information, they rely on active citizens to be telling them, to be taking part in things like neighbourhood watch," Herbert said.

"We need to build this bridge and get communities and the police working together and we want the police to be responsive to what the local community wants."

Six "trailblazing" forces are to go further in developing crime maps.

The home secretary's own Thames Valley police are to map trends in late-night antisocial behaviour; Hampshire are to provide daily access to crime data; Lincolnshire and West Yorkshire are to explore providing information about convicted offenders alongside details of crimes; Surrey are to pioneer mobile phone use of the maps; and Leicestershire are developing an online case tracking system for victims.

The data can be broken down by neighbourhood or narrowed down to individual street level, revealing the shifting patterns of local crime hotspots over time.

Glover's Court in Preston emerges as one of the streets with most recorded crime – 152 incidents in December, 44 of which involved violent offences.

The unusual pattern of 148 asbo incidents in Bolnore Road, Haywards Heath, is thought to relate to the way hoax calls are recorded centrally at the local police station by the Sussex police force.

The information commissioner, Christopher Graham, who was consulted by the police over the exercise, said last night that blocks and zones were the most privacy-friendly way of crime-mapping, and that a strong public interest case would have to be made for the use of more intrusive indicators.

"I welcome the drive to improve accountability through greater transparency. Crime-mapping can be an effective means of letting people know what crimes are taking place in their local area, although care needs to be taken as this can potentially have an impact on the privacy of individuals such as victims or witnesses," he said.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, welcomed the crime maps, but said they "should also include police strength for forces across the UK".

While accountability is an important and key part of neighbourhood policing, government accountability on the resources police have available is also necessary, she said.

"Knowing where crime takes place isn't enough if there aren't sufficient police to deal with it," she said. "People want to know what effect the government's deep and rapid cuts to the police are going to have on their area.

"Already since the general election we have lost around 2,000 police officers and, with 20% cuts to police budgets, this is only the thin end of the wedge."

Research published today by the National Policing Improvement Agency, based on a trial involving 7,434 members of the public, shows that such web-based crime maps do not fuel fear of crime.

Herbert challenged the idea that publishing such data could hit house prices – a concern voiced by estate agents in the past.

"That can't be a reason not to tell the public what is happening," he said. "Crime cannot be swept under the carpet."

Insurance companies, however, may come to rely on them in setting premiums.

New guidelines from the information commissioner's office (ICO) say that those who publish crime maps need to have procedures in place to deal with concerns from victims of crime that their identity has been revealed, or householders who believe their property has been incorrectly labelled as a crime hotspot.

The ICO says the most invasive practice would be to pinpoint a particular household as being linked to a particular crime. He warns against pinpointing an address as being indicative that a crime took place in a general area.