Crime stats go online - for all
2007-04-11 20:52
Pretoria - The Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP) launched a website on Wednesday that will provide accessible data on crime trends in the country.
The website - the crime and victimisation monitoring tool - will combine victim data and police statistics on crime to paint a better picture of crime trends in South Africa, said CJCP research director Patrick Burton in Pretoria.
"The mapping tool will bring together all available public data on which trends can be mapped and be identified easily over a period of time," he said.
So far, the website offers only a breakdown of crime trends in two categories - murder and housebreaking.
The data is not analysed, only pre-packaged.
"The intention of later analysing the data is there, but we want people to analyse the information themselves and, in due time, we will know which crime categories to add on to the website," said Burton.
Site is open to all
The mapping tool is also able to zoom into any size of community. This enables a better understanding of crime trends of even the smallest areas in the country.
The website can accessed by anyone, ranging from housewives to researchers to practitioners, said Burton.
When people understand the context of crime trends, they will be better informed of what to be scared about, he said.
"More information trumps ignorance."
There were concerns about the reliability of the census statistics - which form the baseline of the mapping data - and the crime statistics.
The problems associated with combining statistics from different sources also posed a challenge when designing the mapping tool.
The tool can be found on the CJCP website.
- SAPA