The government has added more crimes to its online crime maps.
The discussion on the Today programme centred around the extent to which the maps, together with new police commissioners might skew decisions on how to use police resources. Back in July, the worry was around whether this would skew incentives to report crimes.
The magnitude of both these effects is unknown. One thing that is certain, however, is that reported crimes have a big effect on house prices. To the extent that this is valuing the costs of crimes (at least to residents) then you would think it should have some bearing on the allocation of resources (independent of the mechanism through which this is achieved). Steve Gibbons interesting post from July has more details.
CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog (formerly SERC)
