Evaluating the impact of open crime data in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of Open Crime Data in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Wide claims are made over the benefts of such data. Police.uk, managed by U.K. Home Offce, publishes Open Crime Data, mandated by the U.K. Government’s Transparency Agenda. Police.uk provides information about recorded crime on a large scale, through mapped crime locations. This enables the creation of “crime apps” providing knowledge about crime.
However issues arise from the use of web-mediated Open Data to leverage transparency. The thesis analyses the complex environments of Open Crime Data and the data themselves. Open Data inhabit a landscape that features secret data or knowledge - by illuminating parts of this ecosystem, the data, its provenance, and effects of the Web, claims for Open Data can be unpicked from a theoretical perspective aligning data, policy and knowledge.
We first i) examine literature and concepts relating to knowledge of crime and Open Data; ii) review data production using concepts from statistics, surveillance and Big Data; iii) analyse how policing and maps have been combined through these first two conceptual areas. Second we use: i) Grounded Theory to examine the context that Police.uk inhabits with respect to Open Data; ii) Big Data concepts and Frame Analysis to examine the impact of Police.uk on Online Social Networks. We iii) then interview cybercrime experts and contrast their views with the results of ii).
The contribution of this thesis is: Empirical evidence of the effects of the publication of Open Crime Data on people; Understanding how on-line social networks play in this and affect analysis of crime data’s impact on organisations and people, including the police themselves; New methodologies to understand this; New ways of conceptualising crime; Understanding of the Web’s contributions to policy.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Thanassis Tiropanis: orcid.org/0000-0002-6195-2852

ORCID for Craig Webber: orcid.org/0000-0003-3900-7579

ORCID for Kieron O'hara: orcid.org/0000-0002-9051-4456

Catalogue record

Export record