The Metropolis

New London murder app walks the tightrope of bad taste

Mike Pollitt | Monday 3 October, 2011 11:25

Murdermap is a great website. Newsy, well-reported, serious accounts of murders in the city, with cases followed from death to trial in a manner which puts most newspapers (and websites) to shame.

So the release of their new free app is good news for amateur criminologists, social consciences, nosey parkers and ghouls. Since this includes everyone, it’s highly recommended. Your gmap becomes a graveyard, with over 500 victims from the 19th century to the present day, pinpointed at the precise location where they got done in.

The historical murders are predictably fascinating. So Crippen is here, just off the Camden Rd. Jack the Ripper gets his spots. This is murder as nostalgia. Death as a comfort blanket, the victims no more real than those knocked off during a cosy Sunday evening in front of ITV3.

But this sense of comfort is ruptured by some shocking juxtapositions. Next to the death site of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes is one rather more contemporary. It is that of Ian Tomlinson, unlawfully killed in 2009 while walking home through the G20 protests. This is a real person, a real death. It feels uncomfortable to be perusing his death site on a gmap as if it were a yelp review. And in this way, the app performs its greatest service. Because Cora Crippen and Catherine Eddowes were real people too. So was Kelvin Francis, stabbed in Walthamstow in 2010. So was Lorna Smith, stabbed in Brixton this February. So were all the victims remembered here. It should be uncomfortable to look at this. These people are dead.

And this makes the Achievements section of the app all the more crass. Here you receive a gold star for “finding” Jack the Ripper. There’s a star for reading 50 case histories, another for reading 100. Having drawn attention to these forgotten victims, or rescued them from the tourist trail, the app once again makes them a statistic. Why make a game of these lives and deaths? You’ve just shown me that they’re not.

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