So the PM has agreed to the idea of online crime maps to keep the public informed of goings on in their area. It sounds great, doesn’t it: just log on, type in your post code and see a breakdown of all the crimes committed near you this month, compared to neighbouring areas.

It isn’t totally new - Londoners can check their borough already at the Met Police website. And a quick look at the figures shows that - despite the media giving the impression we’re entering a new Wild West of guns and knives - crime in London has been on the decline for several years now.

At the time of writing, gun-enabled crime is down 11.5% on last year; violence against the person has dropped 4.8%; murders fell by 1.9% in the last 12 months and robberies are down a massive 19%.

But according to the papers it’s crime “hot-spots” that are the problem, so a plan like these online crime maps is the ideal way to highlight it, right? Wrong, and to illustrate why, I give you an example of an existing online crime mapping scheme:

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Please forgive me for falling into the stereotype trap here, but in my defence I was born in South East London so feel I do have some right to pass judgement on the place. Anyway, the thing is I got this press release today which was bigging up (that’s me trying to be street, or something, and obviously failing) the use of mobile technology as part of a South London college project to tackle gun and knife crime. The LIFEWISE collaboration involves no less than 200 young people from South Thames College as well as six secondary schools across the London Borough of Wandsworth, who were given 200 Vodafone v1615 handsets with unlimited Internet mobile data access to help them work collaboratively on the project.

Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets? If the reports that hit the headlines only yesterday are anything to go by, then the answer should be 160, as 40 of them are statistically likely to have been nicked during a violent street mugging. The Design Council survey, on which the headlines are based, revealed that 1 in 5 of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 in London had been victim of a mugging where an item of mobile personal electronics (mobile phone or iPod essentially) had been nicked.

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