A short blog post about how my MSc research project is going. In one word? Stuttering. I've got some great data but I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with it or what my hypothesis is. Not great eh? I know...! My original plan was to consider how long police vehicles took to respond to 'Immediate' 999 calls, that is those that should be responded to within 12 minutes. However due to the way that the Police database works, this doesn't look like it will be possible. At least not in the way I wanted too. The problem is that their system does not record a vehicle as actively responding to a particular incident until it arrives at the scene...! Odd isn't it. I'd have thought as soon as the dispatcher told a car to answer an incident, that the car would be 'logged' as active on that incident. Because of this, I'm having to work backwards. That is, I take the time that the dispatcher records a car as being assigned to an incident, and then I find that car in the GPS log, and see where it is, and the journey it takes to the incident. This is producing some strange results, but also some good results. For example the below:
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| (Please note that this data is over 2 years old and that the incident location has been arbitrarily moved for the purpose of this blog post for confidentiality reasons) |
Here it is possible to clearly see the vehicle leaving Holborn police station, and driving to the incident in the North of Camden. This journey actually takes the vehicle around 25 minutes, much longer than the Police target of 12 minutes. The reason is immediately obvious - the distance it has to cover. My next step will be to attempt to investigate whether there were any nearer cars at one of the other police stations who could have responded sooner than this vehicle - though again whether this will be possible due to the quality of the data I am unsure.
