Cadmen News: Dominic Clout

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Camden News - by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 8 January 2009

Borough commander Chief Superintendent Dominic Clout

Top cop backs crime map

Support for charts that tell residents about incidents in their street

CAMDEN’S police chief has thrown his support behind a government move to put the borough’s crime figures online on a street-by-street basis.
Borough commander Chief Superintendent Dominic Clout said he was a “supporter” of crime-mapping, as it is known, but urged the public to regard the figures “sensibly” and said the colour-coded maps “come with a warning”.
Chief Supt Clout’s words were in sharp contrast to those of the Police Federation – a union-style body for officers – who warned that the map is not “going to tackle crime at all” and could even assist criminals.
Other critics say the maps could affect house prices if an area is tagged with a high crime label or, worse still, identify an area as a hotspot when perhaps residents are simply more proactive about reporting crimes to the police.
The scheme was launched by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith through police websites across the country on Tuesday morning.
The maps work by showing a breakdown in figures of reported burglaries, robberies and vehicle crime, borough by borough. Information on the police site shows how many crimes took place in the past few months, how many took place in individual wards, and narrows the margin down to an area of just a few streets.
Camden is revealed as having an “above average” crime rate with 3,023 reported to police in October and 2,921 in November.
Chief Supt Clout said: “I think the public should know the level of crimes that are being reported in the borough. It’s public information and I think it’s right to keep them as informed as we can. It’s for sensible folk to make their own interpretations.”
He insisted that the public would be shocked at the low numbers of crimes reported.
“One of my party tricks at public meetings is to say: ‘Can you tell me how many burglaries are reported in one night in Camden?’,” he said.
“I get numbers of 400 – it’s astounding. The level is five. I do the same with street robberies – again the answer is in the hundreds. And it’s three.”
He added: “That’s the perception people have from what they read in the newspaper – give people the information and let them decide.”
However, Chief Supt Clout accepted that in its current “pilot” stage the map is crude and the figures come out “skewed”. He also admitted that it was a long way from helping to tackle crime.
But Chief Supt Clout said he hopes the maps will soon be more sophisticated and could one day help communities and their local police force target hotspots better.
He said that a crime map compiled from statistics in August had been accurate on paper but did not give a full reflection of the borough because there had been an unusually high number of car break-ins made Hampstead
“You spend your time explaining things away – it doesn’t tell you why Hampstead is red (the colour that depicts high levels of crime), but that month they had five more break-ins than other areas,” said Chief Supt Clout.
“As the maps become more sophisticated they become more reflective – at the moment it is in this pilot phase. When it gets to that stage it will become a useful tool. I support the principle.”
He rejected the Police Federation’s spokesman Clive Chamberlain’s claim that the map would give criminals “access to an encyclopaedia of where to go out and commit crime”.
“I can’t see a team of burglars clicking on a crime map before they decide which premises to break into,” added Chief Supt Clout.

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