Note
Published in Cartography and geographic information science, 2015: 97-111.
DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2014.972456
Original article can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2014.972456
Author(s) affiliated with: UCL Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London; Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Summary
"In the United Kingdom, since 2011 data regarding individual police recorded crimes have been made openly available to the public via the police.uk website. To protect the location privacy of victims these data are obfuscated using geomasking techniques to reduce their spatial accuracy. This paper examines the spatial accuracy of the police.uk data to determine at what level(s) of spatial resolution – if any – it is suitable for analysis in the context of theory testing and falsification, evaluation research, or crime analysis. Police.uk data are compared to police recorded data for one large metropolitan Police Force and spatial accuracy is quantified for four different levels of geography across five crime types. Hypotheses regarding systematic errors are tested using appropriate statistical approaches, including methods of maximum likelihood. Finally, a “best-fit” statistical model is presented to explain the error as well as to develop a model that can correct it. The implications of the findings for researchers using the police.uk data for spatial analysis are discussed."