Crime and Justice – Open Data Sources and Resources

In preparation for the upcoming Creation and Innovation Weekend of the?Open Data Institute’s?first?Immersion Programme on Crime and Justice?I’ve been pulling together some links to relevant open data resources.

GIF image that says

Ministry of Justice’s Open justice logo

data.gov.uk does a lot of the fine grained curation and linking already, of course and will often provide links to relevant datasets published by UK public sector organisations.

Then, within the scope of our Crime and Justice Series, the following links may also be interesting.

Crime and Justice Data

The Ministry of Justice?maintains a page linking to it’s statistical resources, along with a publication schedule that looks forward 12 months. The Home Office publish the Police’s recorded crime as open data, which some people might be interested in comparing against??the British Crime Survey. And there is also Police UK’s API that “”allows you to retrieve information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces and for the Police Service of Northern Ireland””

People who don’t mind the challenge of scraping PDF documents might also be interested in the data behind IPSOS Mori’s recent survey showing that concern about crime is at a 20 year low.

Government mini-sites

The?Open Justice?web site has been created by the Ministry of Justice to bring together “some of the key facts and real stories about different aspects of criminal justice; including sentencing and sentences, restorative justice, prison and probation> to help members of the public make sense of the criminal justice system.”

Another useful minisite is The?UK Data Service?which “is a comprehensive resource funded by the ESRC to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data.” The ESRC referenced here is the?Economic and Social Research Council

Open Data Strategies

Each department of the UK government is required to publish an Open Data Strategy. Of interest in the Crime and Justice area are:

The current strategies are for the period 2012-2015. As well as outlining the datasets they currently publish, ministries are also outlining their future plans for open data release. This sometimes includes future publication schedules which may be of interest.

Local Authority open data

Some local authorities have set up open data catalogues which can contain links to data not found in DATA.GOV.UK. Examples include:

Data Greater Manchester logo featuring the strapline

Data GM logo

The Department for Communities and Local Government have also commissioned the?Open Data Communities?site from Swirrl. This has 76 datasets divided into six themes: housing, finance, deprivation, wellbeing, business plan and geographical data.

We’ve set up a repository on GitHub for the Immersion Programme. At the moment this includes the above links on a single wiki page?and?the open data wishlist that was created following the requests we made last month.

Link to Open Data Institute's GitHub Wiki pages for the Crime and Justice series

GitHub Wiki pages for the Crime and Justice series

I’d like to encourage people to use the wiki to add new data sources. You can add any items to the Crime and Justice Open Data wishlist there too.

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