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October 11, 2006updated 22 Nov 2022 9:20pm

Evening Times dedicates a fortnight’s coverage to FoI crime information

By Press Gazette

The Evening Times in Glasgow has launched a two-week series highlighting levels of crime in each neighbourhood in the city using statistics gained from a Freedom of Information request.

The paper began it special coverage on Monday with a poster front page and dedicated a further five pages.

Each day this week the paper published a double page spread examining a city-wide league table based on different crimes or crime categories. Coverage is based on an FoI request for the number and type of crime in the city's 232 police beats in the last year.

Chris Musson, the paper's crime reporter, said: "The police sent us the information in a spreadsheet, which allowed us to analyse the figures, produce city-wide league tables, and draw up mini-profiles of each of the 232 police beat areas in Glasgow.

"I've done a few FoI stories before, but never anything on this scale. I think it's been worth the effort, because nobody before has been able to offer such a detailed insight into crime at such localised levels.

"The amount of information was fascinating, but also a bit daunting. There were hundreds of different crime types listed for the hundreds of beats.

"It took about a fortnight's work to actually analyse the information and produce the league tables and police beats. One of the major obstacles was that the 232 beats only had codenames – like AB01 – so we had to look through maps and rename them as areas of the city."

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