Murdermap: a new approach to crime mapping

[Murdermap]

www.murdermap.co.uk was developed by London court reporters, and gives
the public full access to an archive of stories previously only
available to newspapers (in fact it had mainly been gathering dust in a
drawer in our office).

Users can search the database in a variety of ways, either
through a map of the city or by filtering by categories such as as date,
murder weapon and borough.

So far we've only uploaded the cases from the past three years (already
a fair-sized task) as well as the crimes attributed to Jack the Ripper,
but our ultimate aim is to fill in the entire period in between. Our
archive is fairly comprehensive for the past 30 years, so we hope to
make good progress in the coming months.

We'd be very interested in knowing what everyone thinks of it.
Certainly we see it as a valuable resource to crime writers, as well as
criminologists, lawyers and the police.

Crime mapping itself is also an interesting area. It's been done
before in some US cities, and the police and Government here have
published general maps showing crime rates, but as far as we know this
is the first one to be based on a dedicated archive of court reports like ours.