LONDON, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- A British police Internet site crashed as 5 million hits an hour came from people trying to discover the levels of crime in their areas, officials said.

Police.uk, which launched Tuesday morning with online "crime maps," crashed under an onslaught of 75,000 hits per minute, The Guardian reported.

The Home Office blamed "temporary" technical problems with its online crime map site, promoted by the government as an "important step in accountability and transparency."

The site, providing a monthly snapshot of crime and anti-social behavior on every street across England and Wales, crashed repeatedly within hours of its launch.

The maps, accessible by typing a post code into the site, are also designed to provide contact details for neighborhood policing teams, closed-circuit TV footage of local incidents, and in some cases even a Twitter feed from beat officers, authorities said.

Nick Herbert, the minister for policing and criminal justice, has been an advocate of street-level crime-mapping since seeing it in Los Angeles and said there was "huge interest" among people wanting to know what is happening in their neighborhood, The Guardian said.