Ever wanted to know how many crimes were committed in your local area?

Well, by the end of the year you’ll be able to get some idea with every police force required to produce online interactive “crime maps”.

West Midlands and West Yorkshire are two of the forces who have put information about the number of offences in different neighbourhoods on their Web sites and on Wednesday the country’s biggest force, London’s Metropolitan Police, activated its crime mapping site.

The government believes that the maps will help alleviate public perceptions about crime, revealing that the number of actual offences is far lower than many people fear.

“By rolling out up-to-date, interactive crime maps, we can better inform people about crime problems in their area, and enable them to have much more of a say in what their local police focus on,” said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith last month.

“The latest annual crime figures showed another drop in crime nationwide but it’s important that people understand what this means to them in their local area and where challenges remain.”

New London Mayor Boris Johnson, who made providing the maps a key manifesto commitment, said it gave people the chance to see how their local police were performing.

‘This new online service means that Londoners will, at long last, be able to get information about crime levels in their neighbourhood at the click of a button,” Johnson said.

But how much use are they? The Met’s maps currently only provide details of burglaries, robberies and vehicle crime. The Police Federation, the body that represents rank and file officers, said the maps are not going to help and could even give criminals an idea of where the police are vulnerable.

Criminologists also argue that the data can be misleading as areas with high crime often have low reporting rates.

Looking up the crime statistics for my “sub ward” of London, I discovered the number of crimes fell from 6 to 5 last month, with my area given an “average” crime rating. And to be honest, I don’t know whether that should make me feel relieved, or worried.

Whose DNA is it anyway?

A “citizens’ inquiry” instigated by the Human Genetics Commission, a government advisory body, wants the records of people who have not been convicted, or whose convictions are long spent, to be deleted from the forensic National DNA Database and says the whole archive should be overseen by an independent body.

The database was established in 1995 in Britain - the country where scientists first pioneered the technique of DNA fingerprinting.

It now contains genetic profiles on more than 4 million people, representing the highest proportion of any population on a forensic DNA database in the world, at over 6 percent.

A future government might misuse the information, members of the inquiry fear. One  says keeping all the DNA records would be the first step towards a totalitarian state.

Police, though, find the database a boon, especially in trying to solve ”cold” cases from the past.

What do you think? Is the database becoming too big?

Conservative Swindon council is planning to pull the plug on the 400,000-pound annual grant it makes towards running its speed cameras, saying the money could be better spent on other traffic-calming measures.

Its head of highways, Councillor Peter Greenhalgh, is widely quoted in newspapers as saying cameras are “a blatant tax on motorists.”

Local councils can no longer keep the fines the cameras bring in, which may explain why they may feel less enthusiastic about them than before, but there are plenty of other bodies like the AA which have always felt cameras are over-used and no substitute for active policing.

The Department for Transport says some 1,745 deaths and serious injuries are prevented every year by the cameras.

Would you be happy to see other councils follow Swindon’s example or do you believe that speed cameras are a necessary evil to improve road safety?

 Gordon Brown may have won the 42-day detention vote, but the victory was ”hollow”, ”shameful” or “tactical”, depending on which newspaper you read. 

Under the headline “Westminster for Sale”, The Times said Brown had humiliated parliament with a victory secured through bribery and bartering.

“The prime minister staked his reputation on 42 days to look strong. Instead, he looks weaker. He has failed to win the argument, so has chosen to strike a deal,” it said in an editorial.

“This hollow victory will buy him time in the Westminster village, but at a sad and further cost to parliament’s prestige.”

Brown scraped through thanks to the support from Democratic Unionist MPs, the Daily Telegraph said in an editorial. And he made so many concessions that the legislation ended up looking like a “dog’s breakfast”.

“Why does it feel so much like a defeat?” the paper asked.

It’s because he “lost the argument and shredded his majority”, the Guardian said. He only won “thanks to backroom deals”.

“It was a forced victory in the worst of circumstances, a law no one wants imposed by a government that wanted to look strong, but ended up too weak to accept the obvious,” it said in a leader.

The Daily Mirror said Brown had been “lucky” and must now move on to focus on key issues such as high petrol and food prices. 

“He must take control of the agenda and show families, workers and pensioners what a Labour government is doing for them,” its editorial said.

A lone voice of support came from The Sun.

“Gordon Brown is entitled to considerable satisfaction after his victory,” it said. “He stood up for the fight against extremism in the face of deeply hostile criticism.”

 The 42-day limit is backed by police and security chiefs and will help protect the country, the paper added.

However, The Independent said it was now up to the House of Lords to challenge the legislation and continue its “doughty defence of Britain’s threatened freedoms”.

“We trust that…the Lords and Ladies will show their mettle,” the paper said.

The government has launched a series of hard-hitting adverts, featuring gruesome images of mutilated hands and knives sticking out of victims’ chests.

But even these fail to truly capture the real horror of what knives can do and the trauma it can cause. I know from first hand experience.

On July 23, 2000, I was returning home from a night out with a friend in Brixton in south London.

As were walking down a busy a street, a figure emerged from a side road with his arms in the air, wailing for help. At first we thought he was drunk, but as we got closer we could see he had blood on his hands and was in extreme distress.

“My friend has been stabbed”, he cried out through sobs.

About 20 yards on the side street, we could see his friend — outstretched wearing a T-shirt and shorts lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

I hailed down a passing taxi and told the occupants to call for help while my friend, a doctor, did his best to resuscitate the victim.

But it was far too late. The man died within minutes and I can still remember his last, gurgled breath.

He had received two wounds — one to his knee and the fatal one through his belly, with the layers of subcutaneous fat clearly on display. The knife had passed through his spleen, heart and lungs. He hadn’t stood a chance.

It is hard to describe the horror of the scene. The road underneath the young man’s body was dark and there was blood sprayed all over a nearby wall. His two friends, one of whom had also been stabbed, were drenched in blood and numbed with shock.

They could barely speak when a flustered police officer finally arrived.

And what had led to this? They weren’t members of a gang — in fact they were students from Canada who had come to Britain for their studies.

It transpired that one of the three friends had been mugged earlier in the night, the robbers taking his wallet with 60 pounds. When he went home and told his housemates, they went to try and get his wallet back, and confronted the robbers.

It was a decision that was to prove fatal for one of them.

The killer, another young man, was tracked down soon afterwards and given a life sentence for the murder. That moment of violence had ruined his life as well.

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, sing the officers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance”.

Judging from views expressed by many delegates who gathered in Bournemouth for the Police Federation’s annual conference, it is a refrain that is appropriate for Britain’s bobbies today.

From anger over pay and talk of possible strikes, to underlying resentment about the growth in the number of community support officers, rank and file police are far from content.

“The sergeants of England and Wales are not happy,” said Paul McKeever, chairman of the Federation’s sergeant committee, as he began his speech before delivering a damning verdict of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government.

Brown was a “Mr Bean” figure he said, borrowing the scathing reference from Lib Dem MP Vince Cable, a “bean counter” who had broken the trust between government and police officers over the decision not to backdate a pay rise recommended by an independent panel as expected.

“How feckless, how incompetent and how very imprudent Gordon Brown must have been to get us into this dreadful state, McKeever went on, before reminding his colleagues that Brown has registered the fastest fall in popularity of any British Prime Minister.

It was hardly surprising that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith bore the brunt of the resentment over pay when she faced the delegates. A brave decision, said Jan Berry, the Federation’s chairman, but not one that spared her from ridicule or mockery.

But it wasn’t just pay that had got the delegates’ heckles up. The growth in the number of community support officers (PCSOs) — officers who have less training and fewer powers than full police officers — was another issue arousing strong feeling.

Smith was greeted with jeering and laughter when she suggested that the public would be as happy to have a PCSO as a proper bobby on the beat. Berry said her members feared that it could mean proper officers only dealt with confrontational issues, “a paramilitary force and one fundamentally different from the concept of policing by consent”.

Berry continued: “The inept management of modernisation is nothing short of a scandal.”

Despite the anger directed at the government, perhaps the recipient of the greatest derision was Richard Bobbett, the Chief Executive Officer for Airwave, the police’s radio communications system.

It often didn’t work properly in London, didn’t work at all in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff — just making a “beep, beep” noise, and radios needed to be put in plastic bags if it was raining, delegates told him.

Alan Gordon, Police Federation vice chairman, said he suspected it would struggle to even cope with “a well-attended village egg and spoon race”.

Jacqui Smith has probably faced some unwelcoming audiences in her time as Home Secretary but it is unlikely she has faced one as tough as the 1,000 angry police officers she encountered on Wednesday.

Smith knew she was in for a grilling when she spoke to delegates at the Police Federation conference, furious that a pay rise, recommended by an independent panel, had not been
honoured in full.

Only the day before, it was announced that police had voted in favour of seeking the right to strike and so she understandably looked apprehensive as officers filed into the
vast conference centre in Bournemouth.

And barely had Jan Berry, the Federation’s outgoing chairman, begun her speech than the audience was putting the boot in.

Berry said she had seen a lot during her five years as chairman, including two Prime Ministers “and counting” and four Home Secretaries. “And counting” came a cry, to laughter from the delegates and a resigned smile from Smith.

It got worse. Berry said she admired Smith’s courage in coming to face the inquisition.

“I am sure when your Private Secretary reminded you of today’s event you felt like reaching for the nearest stab proof vest,” she said, in a mocking reference to recent pictures of Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman out in her constituency.

That was followed by a dig at Smith’s confessions she had smoked cannabis when she was a student.

“Your recent crimes have been more for the serious fraud office than the drug squad,” said Berry, drawing appaluse and more laughter from the delighted officers.

But the chairman was still warming up.

She asked how it was the government found 2.7 billion pounds to resolve the row over the abolition of the 10 percent tax band just days before an important by-election but couldn’t find 30 million money to pay for the police pay rise.

And when teachers went on strike recently over pay, Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, had said it would be irresponsible to override the
settlement agreed by their independent panel, Berry told her.

“Home Secretary, what is it that Mr Balls has but you do not?” she said, to howls of appreciation from delegates.

Smith, smile long gone, now had a face of thunder.

“This was no journalistic accident, but a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family.”

That’s the verdict of media commentator Roy Greenslade after the Daily Express and Daily Star apologised to Kate and Gerry McCann for suggesting they were involved in their daughter’s disappearance.

The former Daily Mirror editor said “wild claims” about the parents of Madeleine McCann have undermined British journalism.

“The stories were not merely speculative, but laced with innuendo which continually made accusations against the McCanns on the basis of anonymous sources and without any hard evidence,” he wrote.

Greenslade said he doubted whether the paper’s editors would resign or whether the Press Complaints Commission would take any action.

Public relations consultant Max Clifford says reporters were put under huge pressure to deliver “news” even when there were no firm developments.

“Rumours and nonsense are being given to us as facts,” he told BBC radio.

Gerry McCann wrote on his blog that the family was “utterly dismayed” by some of the media coverage of the case.

Charlie Beckett, director of the media think-tank Polis, said: “This could be the moment when the tide turns against certain media excesses that have been growing in recent years. Most of the media had gone a bit mad over this story”

Do you think the media as a whole were unfair to Kate and Gerry McCann?