"Social problems don't usually have (purely) technological solutions. The human factor always returns to bite you in the backside."

That is not always the case. While there are some things which will always be with us, many times "purely technological solutions" fail because they don't go far enough or are done on the cheap, with the former often being the case because of the latter. There are times technologists should Just Say No, that a system can't be built for the price sought.

Thus, in the case of crime statistics, like health statistics, three features are necessary for their proper collection and use. First, their reporting needs to be standardized, made mandatory, and based upon tangible measures. Some of these measures ought to be carefully chosen proxies for intangibles. Second, their collection and reporting needs to be periodically audited by a group independent of the organization subject to scruitany. Third, a team of statisticians needs to be consulted on their presentation, and one or more should be on call to assist in formal interpretation.

The trouble with pin-maps is that they are a crude means of estimating a spatial density, and there are far better ways of doing that, particularly digitally. If risk of crime is to be presented, surely the kernel size used to estimate these densities needs to consider the mobility of prospective criminals and potential victims.

This isn't stuff that's abstract and in the clouds. Field biologists use spatial statistics like this all the time.

All the same, I understand the sunk cost problems of trying to change the practices of big organizations. For example, I don't believe it was until very recently that the FBI's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) took an epidemiological view of crime and its reporting, and ceased relying upon voluntary reports from local and state police. Before that, one got anomalies about, say, homicides, because one set of numbers came from BJS, and pathologists reported their determinations up through Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and they didn't match.