Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
Below are my thoughts on another recent Help Me Investigate project - this time looking at Birmingham Council’s use of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows covert surveillance powers for investigating misdemeanours.
Figures released in response to this FOI request by Paul Bradshaw reveal - I believe, at first glance - that Birmingham is compartively trigger happy, using powers granted by the act six times more than typical councils.
Update 3pm Friday 7th: Please see the comments section for a health warning over the 1,707 statistic and resulting conclusion thaty Birmingham is so prolific a user of RIPA. This investigation remains a work in progress!
Birmingham accounts for roughly a 60th of the UK’s population (pop c. 1 million). In 2007 (calendar year) there were 1,707 council applications to use RIPA powers nationwide.
Unfortunanately these totals are given in financial years. For 2006/7 there were 115 uses of RIPA in Birmingham, in 2007/8 there were 99.
So conservatively assuming there were 100 uses of RIPA in 2007, Birmingham accounted for just under 6% of all local council RIPA uses, despite only accounting for 1% of the population. So it’s surveilling roughly six times as many of its citizens as the typical council.
Other issues get more subjective. Home Office guidlines stress “very strict safeguards” on RIPA use, which should be in “exceptional circumstances” only. Does having 22 officials authorised to use RIPA match that? Does surveilling 575 people? Personally I have my doubts.
Take fly tipping. RIPA has been used 27 times in relation to fly tipping, despite “late bins” being one of the example issues used to reassure the public on RIPA safeguards.
Relevent extract from Home Office:
“Local authorities have a range of powers available to them to tackle littering and fly tipping. However it shouldn’t be necessary or appropriate to use RIPA directed surveillance powers to observe people putting their rubbish bins out early for collection. RIPA allows certain public authorities to authorise covert surveillance and covert human intelligence sources for the prevention and detection of crime and prevention of disorder – but only where it is necessary and proportionate to do so.
When councils use RIPA we expect them to use these laws proportionately and sensibly in the interest of investigating crimes and protecting their communities.”
As to next steps, the prosecution issues and so forth are clearly going to prove difficult to appeal. Is there any hope of persuading some local bloggers - or better - local papers to pick up what’s been got already and trying to encourage some people to come forward?
Identifying some people involved would both humanise this, and help get a subjective handle on how reasonable Birmingham’s RIPA use is.
Any thoughts?
Help Me Investigate is - quite simply - fantastic. It’s a site designed to help people collaberate on investigations, usually based around questions. An early question was “on which Birmingham streets are the most parking tickets issued?”. And it’s been answered in style.
Heather Brooke used Freedom of Information to get hold of the full record of tickets issued in the last year. I posted a few (rambling) thoughts on the figures on the site, while this guy did a rather more thorough job. With graphs. The Birmingham Post then ran the story in full - and to its credit, cited HMI thoroughly.
All great stuff. And now the site’s out of beta, users are no longer restricted to asking questiond about Birmingham, which must come as a relief to users outside the West Midlands.
The only problem is, I’m worried it might just leave me jobless. Which would be, as they say, a bit of a bugger.
Data is slowly, painstakingly, starting to catch on in UK journalism. Computer Assisted Reporting, as data journalism is clunkily and unhelpfully dubbed, is huge in the US, with almost every paper having a CAR editor and many having full CAR teams. In the UK, the situation’s different - outside the web team and tech desk, even reporters able to do a bit of excel analysis are few and far between.
The Centre of Investigative Journalism has been spearheading a move to change that. Each year it flies over US CAR experts to train up UK journos, who are also being encouraged to start training up their newsrooms, and current journalism students in using data to produce stories (not mashups, not cool data, not spreadsheets, though all are nice - the emphasis is on stories).
Thanks to their efforts, and some damn good work priming the pump from some early freelance adopters - including (yet again) Heather Brooke - a bit of a market is starting to emerge. Stories based on FOI and data analysis will sell, just. Slowly it’s becoming possible to practise this newer brand of investigative journalism. With a bit of momentum, it could yet hit the newsrooms proper, as compared to chequebook journalism, this is cheap as chips.
And here’s where Help Me Investigate, despite its brilliance, gives me chills. Some of the best data journalism is incredibly complex, fraught with legal issues, and inordinately time-consuming. Some downright middling data journalism comes close. This article on police compensation was a CAR story.
The most complex bit of data-analysis in that story was simply working out rates per 100,000. But gathering FOI data from 43 police forces, in different formats, getting them into one sheet, cleaning the data, and working out reliable population estimates was both lengthy and dull. Then the real work started: contacting each force before publication to give chance to respond - then dealing with each force coming up with a string of excuses and (much lower) revised numbers. This relatively straightforward story ended up taking well over 50 man hours.
Most don’t. But if papers can get stories that look and feel like “investigations” from sites like HMI very cheaply - even free - the rationale for hiring data journalists or buying in their stories gets weaker, especially given the newsroom climate of constant cost-cutting.
Projects like the Birmingham car parking tickets investigation are great targets for collaberation, work everyone should be glad is being done, and perfectly suited to sites like HMI. The more complex stuff is likely less so. It would be a crying shame if a scheme like HMI led to less of this work being done.
There is an alternative school of thought that leads to a virtuous circle - data journalists can work with HMI on some investigations and keep a steady stream of compartively straightforward stories flowing. The journalists most eager to help out on the site will have the inside track to publish, and in turn will also have more of their own time to work on the complex stuff that takes full-time workers.
If CAR were more established in the UK, and newsroom culture wasn’t what it is, I’d tend immediately towards this latter happy option. But at present, the majority of the UK’s data journos do their stories as freelancers - and losing this sort of low-hanging fruit both hits income (and given the “news mix”) makes the pitching battle harder.
It would be a crying shame if the brilliantly intentioned - and rather nicely executed - social journalism project that is HMI actually ended up stifling a fledgling journalistic field. Maybe I’m far too negative. But it does seem the risk is there.
With thanks to the twittered contributions and back-and-forth from:
@paulbradshaw and @podnosh - two of the site’s founders
and @rasga and @coneee
Thoughts gratefully received…
Police forces across the UK are spending £39m each year on press and PR officers - enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers. The highest spending forces spend more than eight times more per person than the lowest, and FOI spending is suffering by comparison: the police spend nearly ten times more on PR - what they want us to know - than on Freedom of Information - what we actually ask to find out.
That’s three of the main findings of a big FOI research piece by Heather Brooke and me, published today in the Times. It’s worth noting the spend is more than enough to pay for the police’s full backdated pay rise, which they were denied by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
Spending is also on the up, much higher than inflation: overall PR spending has increased 13.3% in two years, when police forces are under significant budgetary pressure. In some forces this increase is significantly higher: some forces have doubled their spending in two years.
Finally, it’s worth noting the blatant disrespect for the law shown by many police forces.The FOI Act requires public authorities to respond to Freedom of Information requests within 20 working days. Only 19 of the UK’s 52 police forces managed this, and after 50 working days four forces have still managed to offer no meaningful data.
In the spirit of offering bonus content over here, if you want to see how much your local police force spent, there’s a link to a simple summary table for all of the UK’s forces below, or if you’d like to see the full database, it’s online too. Freedom of information - good, innit?
