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Tuesday 20 October 2009

Police Fail


Never mind the slightly dubious issue of mapping crime hotspots, the announcement of a new service using data from the UK's police force to map crime was always going to generate a lot of interest.

The map is meant to look something like the image on the right (click to enlarge), but because this is the UK the server is clearly underspecified for the amount of interest that it is generating, because anyone who actually tries to visit maps.police.uk gets the rather predictable result below:


It's all a bit reminiscent of when the 1901 Census site went offline for months. Is it beyond the capabilities of the people implementing to judge demand?

Incidentally, the Met have a similar mapping system sensibly powered by Google, which seems to work quite well.

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