Surfing the Crime Net
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Surfing the Crime Net by Daniel Gilling Surfing the Crime Net is intended to be a regular feature of this journal. Its purpose is to review the sources of information about crime prevention and community safety which are currently available on the World Wide Web (WWW). The review is intended to be an international one, examining English-language material from across the globe. As thousands of subscribers daily come on-line, plugging in to the Internet and specifically the WWW, so its status as a source of information appears to grow, and it is regarded less and less as a solitary refuge for the computer bore. The WWW is proving its worth as a source of information for teachers, researchers and practitioners alike and this is as true in the field of criminal justice as it is in many other subjects. Unfortunately, the WWW is also replete with commercialism and information of dubious quality (although thankfully not in my experience pornography, as many sceptics appear to presuppose), and its unregulated massive expansion inevitably means that if you do not know what you are looking for, or where to look, you can spend unproductive hours surfing the net without reward. This feature intends to make the surfing more rewarding and less time-consuming, by directing readers towards the more useful and higher quality sources of information. It will do this both by listing sources which may be of interest to crime prevention and community safety practitioners and academics, as well as by engaging in more detailed reviews of individual web sites, or web sites grouped around particular themes. In the case of listing sources of interest, it comes with the health warning that web sites can disappear as fast as they appear: what is here today may be gone tomorrow, and there is no guarantee of web sites remaining open indefinitely. Finally, before we get started, it is worth stressing that this feature is not generally intended as a technical ‘how to do it’ guide, not least because such a feat lies beyond the skills and knowledge of this novice user. In the main, the technical information will extend only to passing on the addresses of the Web pages, sometimes referred to as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and generally expressed in the format http://www.blah.blah.htm. That said, for this particular contribution only, a small number of very simple points or tips may well be worth making at this juncture. Apologies are made in advance for preaching to the converted: 1.
Try to use the Internet when the USA is asleep. When Americans wake up and come online there is a noticeable slowdown in WWW operations, and it takes a lot longer for documents to download. To some extent you can mitigate the effects of this from the more elaborate WWW pages by switching off the pictures (clicking off ‘auto load images’ from the options menu in Netscape, for example).
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When you find particularly good sources of information or links — such as the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology links to other sites of criminological inter-
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