How much crime in your area?
From today, citizens in England & Wales are able to find out which crimes have taken place on or near their street within the past month and which officers are responsible for their area. Information on crime is broken down into six categories – burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, violence, other crime and anti-social behaviour. Local police appeals and details of police community meetings will also be published alongside the maps.
All this information is on a new web site which has a home page as simple as that of the Google search engine. On its first day, the site has been so popular that it has received up to five million hits an hour or some 75,000 a minute. There have been some (presumably temporary) glitches.
This is an example of how government can make use of Web 2.0 tools to empower citizens and we can expect more to come.
You can check out the site here.