About

Citizens Report is a not-for-profit, independent organisation that seeks to put citizens in the lead position to improve the safety of homes and streets.

This site was designed to demonstrate how citizens could use the internet and web enabled mobile devices to develop their own community intelligence and instantly report and locate incidents, crimes and other issues that have made them feel less safe in their homes and streets.

Citizens Report has made these reporting and information services available because:

  1. The majority (60%) of arrestable offending within the UK is not reported to the police and even when incidents are reported to the police, only about 2 thirds of these reports eventually make it onto official crime statistic.
  2. Some of the lowest levels of crime reporting occur within some of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in our communities: women, young people, and minority groups across: race, religion, sexuality, disability.
  3. Just counting crime numbers doesn’t provide citizens with sufficient information to assess the risk and threats to their safety and security

Citizens Report is NOT a “crime fighting” service and is not meant to replace or replicate the need to report crime to the police or other enforcement services if you are seeking a resolution based around the capture and prosecution of offenders.

Our mission is to ensure citizens lead in tackling and preventing crime by giving them the means to directly inform other citizens of the potential harms in their area.

Citizens Report relies on the freely given advice and experience of professionals and lay-people in community safety, health, education, childcare, youth-work, civil liberties and social regeneration. And a special thanks to ShakaZoom web and database programming, who have allowed us to develop this site at minimal cost.
For those with a technical interest – this site was developed by ShakaZoom Digital who used a cloud database approach to drive down costs and Javascript, Googles Maps APIv3, PHP 5, HTML, WordPress and CSS for functionality.

Following the successful launch of the Citizens Report site at the start of 2011 we have had our service recognised by Baroness Newlove (Champion for Safe and Active Communities) in April 2011 as a innovative service that places community safety information in the hands of citizens. In July 2011 we ported our crime reporting software and functionality to Mulikamwizi a Kenyan organisation to support a citizens crime reporting site there.
If you are interested in developing your own citizens reporting site please feel free to contact us.

We welcome your views and feedback to help us shape the services we provide.

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FAQ

1. Why are you only allowing the reporting of street crime?

  • We are focusing on street crime because: residential burglaries (around 83%) are already reported to the police and there is little need to replicate this service; the other very good reason is that this site can provide the exact location of a crime and we would like to preserve the personal privacy of residential crime victims. We may provide a feature for residential crime reporting for victims only at a later date

    • 2. Why have you made this site?

  • The majority of offences are unreported to the police. With many serious incidents affecting the safety of citizens such as: sexual offending, street crime, domestic violence, and hate crime, remaining largely unreported. We think it is important to demonstrate that there are different ways for communities and citizens to report, learn or discuss crime and other harmful issues in their neighbourhoods that is not reliant on a single channel of information.

    • Table 1. Percentage of crime types reported to the Police
    Percentage of offence types reported to police

    Even when an offence is reported to the police it may not be recorded as a crime. A crime record is often left to the discretion of officers, and although this can be useful to stop trivial matters being recorded, even serious incidents of theft, violence or sexual offending may be not be recorded, or noted under a less serious offence category.

    The detection and conviction rate for recorded crimes are low.
    From offences to convictions
    Source University College London – Jill Dando Institute
    http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/publications/presentations/inaugural_lecture_2001.php

    Detection rates for some offences in England and Wales (Source – Home Office)

    Detection rates: by type of offence

    (Percentages)
    Violence against the person 54
    Sexual offences 43
    Rape 36
    Fraud and forgery 26
    Robbery 18
    Theft and handling stolen goods 16
    Theft of vehicles 15
    Theft from vehicles 6
    Burglary 12
    Criminal damage 13
    All recorded crime 24

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