Legal#

This page sets out who publishes CrimeaWatch, how personal data is handled, what happens when you visit the site, and the terms under which the material here may be reused. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Who Publishes This Site#

CrimeaWatch is an independent civic initiative. It is not affiliated with any government body, political party, state agency, or advocacy organisation, and it receives no institutional or government funding.

Correspondence reaches us at the addresses on the Contact page. Every message is answered.

The Material We Publish#

Where it comes from#

We publish only personal data that is already in the public domain — drawn from official registers, published decisions and documents of state bodies, public statements, media reports, and public social media accounts. We publish nothing from any other source: no non-public records, no leaked material, nothing obtained by covert means, and nothing for which we cannot point to an accessible source.

Each entry cites the sources it rests on, so that any reader can check it independently rather than taking our word for it.

What we document#

Profiles record decisions, votes and statements made in a public capacity, together with the positions and affiliations needed to identify who acted and in what role. They are documentation of conduct in public office or public function, not assessments of anyone’s private life.

Asking us to change or remove something#

If you are named on this site you may ask what we hold about you and where each item came from, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be removed or restricted. Write to [email protected]. You do not need to give a reason, cite a legal basis, or act through a lawyer.

The full procedure, including what we remove and what we do not, is set out under Removal and Restriction Requests. We answer every request, including the ones we refuse, and we give reasons either way.

Right of Reply#

Before an organisation’s profile is treated as final, we write to it with the specific facts recorded about it — the decisions that name it, the roles it held, the people it put forward — and give it five calendar days to respond. Where no contact channel can be established, we say so on the site rather than recording the organisation as having declined to comment.

A response is assessed against the underlying sources. Where a statement on a profile is shown to be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, the profile is amended and the correction is recorded on the page. We do not undertake to reproduce responses verbatim — except where that undertaking was already given, in the notices sent on 31 August 2026, which stands for the organisations that received it.

This procedure currently applies to organisations. Individuals named on the site can use the same channels at any time, and we answer every request.

How Long Entries Stay#

Entries are a record of decisions taken at a particular time, so they are kept rather than retired. When someone’s position or affiliation changes, we record the change; we do not delete the earlier record, because a record that is edited to match the present is no longer a record.

That is not a refusal to remove anything. Personal details come down under the rule set out in Removal and Restriction Requests, and an entry that is shown to be inaccurate is corrected or withdrawn. What stays is the sourced account of what was decided and by whom.

Corrections#

Every profile carries the date it was last changed, shown on the page itself. That date comes from the site’s revision history, so it moves whenever the page moves and cannot fall out of step with it.

It tells you that a page has changed, not what changed. We keep no separate log of corrections. If you want to know what was altered on a particular profile and why, write to [email protected] and we will tell you.

What Happens When You Visit#

We run no accounts, logins, comments, newsletters or forms. There is nothing here to sign up for and nothing to submit through the site.

• Hosting. Like any website, this one is delivered by a hosting provider, which handles the requests needed to serve pages — and that includes your IP address.
• Audience measurement. We count visits in aggregate, through a service that sets no cookies, builds no profile of you, and does not follow you to other sites.
• View counter. Opening a profile sends that page’s identifier to api.crimeawatch.org, which adds one to that profile’s total. So that a reload is not counted twice, the counter keeps a one-way hash of your IP address, the page and the date in our hosting provider’s cache for at most 24 hours, after which it expires on its own. The hash is not written to the counter’s database, is not combined with anything else, and is used only to decide whether to add one. Your IP address itself is not stored.
• Search. Runs entirely in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.
• Typefaces and icons. These are currently loaded from third-party content delivery networks, which means those providers see your IP address. We intend to serve them from our own domain instead.

Cookies and Browser Storage#

We set no cookies. Not for analytics, not for advertising, not for anything else. There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to consent to.

Two small items are stored locally by your browser so that the site behaves sensibly:

Both stay on your own device. Neither is sent to us, neither identifies you, and clearing your browser’s site data removes them.

Copyright and Reuse#

Our own material — free to reuse#

The text written for this site and the database compiled here are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

You may copy, republish, translate, adapt and build on this material, including commercially, provided you credit CrimeaWatch and link to the source page. No permission request is needed, and none of this changes if you are reporting critically about us.

A sufficient credit looks like this:

Source: CrimeaWatch, https://crimeawatch.org/ — CC BY 4.0

Journalists and researchers who want a structured export rather than scraped pages can ask at [email protected].

Material that is not ours — not covered#

The licence above covers only what we produced. It does not extend to:

• photographs and other images, whose rights remain with their photographers and original publishers
• quoted material, documents, and decisions issued by state bodies and other organisations
• names, logos and emblems of the bodies and organisations documented here

Those are reproduced here to document a public record. If you want to reuse them, the rights holder is who you need, not us. If you are a rights holder and an image here is yours, write to [email protected] and we will credit it or take it down.

Terms of Use#

Accuracy. We do not claim this record is exhaustive or free of mistakes.

Not legal advice. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is a finding by any court or authority. Documenting that a decision was taken is not a determination that anyone committed an offence.

External links. We link to sources so that readers can verify them. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for what they publish or how they handle your data.

Availability. The site is provided as it is. We make no promise that it will be available, complete, or uninterrupted.

Contact#

• Removal and privacy requests: [email protected]
• Corrections: [email protected]
• Reuse, exports and media: [email protected]
• Everything else: [email protected]

Last updated: October 2026