FearSquare.com – Combining public crime data with social media services

Andrew Garbett, Shaun Lawson, Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Jamie Wardman and Derek Foster

Lincoln Social Computing Research CentreUniversity of Lincoln

People can use the application to easily understand the levels of crime in places that they commonly live, travel through, or visit

Allows people to visualize and interact with official UK crime statistics in a way that is specific to their own, individual, everyday life

Provides a platform for research into people’s perception of crime in their life

Police.uk API http://www.police.uk/api/docs/ Allows you to retrieve crime information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces.

Data.Gov.Ukhttp://data.gov.uk/The Government is releasing public data to help peopleunderstand how government works and how policies are made.

Foursquarehttp://foursquare.com

Location based service where you earn awards and badges for ‘checkingInto’ places such as your favourite bar, restaurant or hang out place

You ‘Check In’ using a mobile app and this data is displayed onfoursquare.com and available to your friends

How does it work?

Uses RESTful API calls for data from foursquare and police.uk

Foursquare Check-ins and Gov Crime Data

Public interest of already available government data

Unfortunately the majority of users are from countries which public crime data is not currently available, or not suitable for this project

Fearsquare usage statistics show that the public are extremely interested in new and exciting visualisations/applications, even if the data is already available elsewhere

Incorporation of International Crime Statistics

FearSquare currently uses UK crime statistics and therefore only provides data on UK foursquare locations

We urge EU countries to release their own crime statistics:ONLINE from a LIVE SOURCE in a MACHINE-READABLE format

http://www.police.uk/api/docs/ <- Good example of online crime data

Importantly crime records should contain the following;

Where Crime Location (Latitude/Longitude)What Crime Type (Anti-social, robbery etc.)When Date of reported crime

What needs to be done

Developers need data that is;in machine readable formatsavailable from a well documented, live online

sourcein the purest formatin the finest granularity availableable to be limited based on parameters

Impacts of data misrepresentation

Developers and data controllers need to be vigilant of how data is presented so as not to cause a detrimental effect on third parties

“@anon – Apparently a branch of Costa Coffee in Cambridge is the most bad-ass place on Foursquare in the UK!”

Great applications are being made, but what's the point if they are not being

recognised?• Data controllers need to formulate a selection process which will allow

developers to submit applications to a central ideas hub• These ideas can then be formally presented as government backed

applications for use in the public domain

Questions?