SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

We’ve be arguing for open crime data since our launch in 2007. Now that the open data movement has picked momentum, we are hoping to see more and more police agencies and cities around the country embrace the open data model with public crime data. This post has been inspired by many articles we’ve read recently. Check out our Open Data board on Pinterest  for more resources. What is Open Crime Data? Open crime data should include all crime related information that is not subject to privacy laws like victim’s names or juvenile information. It shouldn’t be a requirement by police agencies to fill out a lengthy FOIA to get public information. Instead, it should be released by agencies in a timely manner (like daily) instead of monthly or quarterly or annually like UCR reports. A good solution would be to post the information in a machine readable format on the agency’s website. For example, Philadelphia is has an API, Baltimore uses an open data portal, and Los Angeles has a crim...

When talking about crime data, is there a distinction between open, public, and proprietary crime data. Absolutely. What is open data? Open data is data that’s available in a machine readable format without restrictions on the ability to use, consume, or share the information. Philadelphia and Chicago are good examples of cities that have open crime data available for residents, the press, and anyone to collect, use, and redistribute. Philadelphia SpotCrime Map Open crime data is the best option for police agencies. The easier the information is to obtain, the easier it is to get more eyes on the information which, we believe, leads to really cool ways to view the data and, most importantly, leads to safer and more informed neighborhoods. What is public data? Public data is data that’s available to the public to collect or look at, but it’s not easily redistributed (or machine readable) and sometimes not easily obtained. It might require an open record...

Last March, SpotCrime was asked to testify on the Maryland Open Data Bill SB644. You can read more about the bill and follow it on OpenStates . The bill, which was passed in April 2014 and took effect June 2014, establishes the Council on Open Data, which is tasked with promoting the policy of the State that open data be machine readable and released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable, including through the use of open data portals. Our testimony is below. We hope publishing the testimony helps others who are trying to create open data legislation in their city or state. Written Testimony Senate Bill SB644 March 2014 Oral Testimony given by Colin Drane, SpotCrime founder, March 2014 Thank you for your time today. Colin Drane, Founder SpotCrime.com, a Baltimore based public facing crime mapping website. Currently we are the most visited crime mapping website in the US with over 1 m. unique views a month and over 8 m. crim...

UPDATE: We are now getting crime data from Irving, TX! SpotCrime is required to FOIA this information each time we want updates. The Irving PD is giving this information for free (via an automatically updated feed) to a private vendor that restricts how the public and press can use the information, but they do not require the vendor to send a FOIA request each time they'd like to update the data on their website. Ultimately, we would like to see this data published to an open data portal. We are not sure when or if this will be accomplished. We'd like to note that we've paid for programming for the city to pull this data and to set up automatic updates, similar to how the department is automatically updating their third party private vendor, however, Chief Spivey and the city have elected not to set up automatic updates. Instead, they are making a city employee manually pull and send the data each time it is requested. We believe this to be an intentional waste of time a...

Arnold Ventures, a non-profit with focus on criminal justice reform, recently published the report “Because the Road to Reform is Paved by Data. CAMPAIGN FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE DATA MODERNIZATION” . The report notes that effective police reform relies on gathering data in order to effectively assess the criminal justice system and support reforms and restore public trust. SpotCrime is no stranger to navigating the bureaucratic and technical divide between police agencies when it comes to collecting public crime data on a national level. All police database infrastructures are made up of different systems, making it hard to collect data on a national level. The report makes 6 recommendations, that we’ve included below, and outlines a total of 36 action items for anyone willing to tackle this problem and make data collection across jurisdictional lines seamlessly easy. The report asks for the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) to act as the overarching power to enforce data standards and pr...

Compared to a couple of years ago, there has been exponential growth in the number of cities opening up crime data. How should success be measured? We’ve checked out Chicago and Louisville - two cities who have been publishing crime data openly for a couple of years - to see what’s being done with data.  These cities are successful with crime data because: Not only is the data available to view without anyone having to ask for it or restrictions on the ability to collect, use, and share It’s being used by many different people, companies, websites, and apps! Not surprisingly, we aren’t the only crime map in town! In addition to SpotCrime, there are other privately run crime maps as well as news agencies digesting the data. And interestingly, crime mapping vendor websites that typically charge for services seem to be mapping Chicago and Louisville crime data for free.  By providing open crime data, and because companies like SpotCrime map crime for the public ...

Police transparency and openness is colliding full force with technology and trust. We continue to run into issues collecting crime data from agencies nationwide , however, our push for open, equal, and fair access to public crime information is making headway. Policy language Open data policies are now including language that covers how vendors deal with public data. Check out the language in the draft open data policy for Jersey City : All data or data sets published pursuant to Section III shall be published in a non-proprietary, searchable, sortable, platform-independent, machine-readable format.  All data or data sets shall include available metadata.   To the greatest extent practicable, the City shall assign unique identifiers to all data and data sets.  The City shall not place any restrictions on third-party reuse of data or data sets.  The City shall not provide to third parties any copies, records or logs of the identities or IP address...

SpotCrime.info on a mobile browser You may think that SpotCrime is simply a crime map and really cool crime alerts. Well, we’ve become a lot more than that since our launch in 2007. We want public crime information in the hands of every person as quickly as possible. In order to reach that goal, we’ve realized transparency and openness are two very important aspects to government and public data. That’s why we’d like you to ask your police department to post your city’s public crime data openly. ‘ Openly ’ means the data is available in a machine readable format without restrictions on the ability to use, consume, or share the information. A good place to post would be on the  city’s open data portal website (if they have one yet) or directly their own police agency’s website. Why should you ask them to do this? There are a couple of reasons. 1 - Remove the restrictions on public data. Posting in an open format would remove any restrictions a third party vend...

Updates have been made to the SpotCrime ‘Live’ Crime Data Transparency Ranking list. Only 1 city was upgraded to a 2 ranking - Baltimore. They added a calls for service and arrest data feeds after the Freddie Grey protests. 5 cities were downgraded. The recurring reason for the decrease in transparency across the country? Police system ‘upgrades’. The new year has brought dozens of RMS/CAD/database upgrades to police departments nationwide. It’s great to see agencies embracing new technology, however, these new upgrades are knocking public access to crime information offline. Boston, MA - 2 to a 0  BPD is no longer updating the open data feed due to RMS upgrade . No timeline has been given as to when the feed will be available again. Phoenix, AZ - 2 to a 1   The Phoenix  RMS upgrade knocked a weekly public file offline and dramatically decreased the the timeliness and quality of the data. St. Louis County, MO - 2 to a 0   St....

Recently the Benton County Sheriff (Arkansas) announced a new public  crime map . Local news OzarksFirst.com reported that the map was paid for by a $15,000 grant. Not a large sum, and often crime mapping vendors have similar contact costs charging $150 a month for public crime mapping services. Using a simple discounted cash flow valuation of a police agency contract at $1,800 a year at a 10% discount rate, you'll get a total valuation of the vendor mapping contract at $18,000 (divide 10% into $1,800). Very similar to the amount paid by Benton. We have seen some agencies pay larger sums for public crime mapping. Most notably, Seattle Police Department spent approximately $350,000 for their public mapping system. So how do we get to $180 million in savings? Since we are using back of the envelope numbers, we are going to be very conservative in our estimated costs. We'll use an approximate cost of $10,000 per police agency for public crime mapping. ...

Below is our paper that was recently published in The American Society of Criminology's  newsletter The Criminologist . The American Society of Criminology (ASC) is an international organization whose members pursue scholarly, scientific and professional knowledge concerning the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency. ASC publications consist of the following: the journals, Criminology and Criminology & Public Policy , and the newsletter, The Criminologist . Check out our article on page 7 of their most recent newsletter or read it below. A Call for Researchers to Embrace Robust, Open Crime Data Access to accurate and timely data on crime is important for any city wanting to uphold and improve policing. Unfortunately, although such data is increasingly being collected by cities, access to it is increasingly being restricted by private companies or by cities themselves, making it difficult if not impossible ...

One of the biggest drivers behind the current police reform demands in the US is police data . There are a myriad of police datasets available within a police department that paint a picture of the inner workings and behavior of its officers with the public. There are many different datasets circulating within a police agency. One of the least ‘sensitive’ data points (the lowest hanging fruit) is the data SpotCrime asks for from police agencies nationwide - Records Management System (RMS) data and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD/911) data. This data has been around and released to the media and public for centuries . It includes what is known as a ‘crime blotter’ - a list of what and where crime occurs throughout the day within a police jurisdiction and what where and when police respond to the public’s calls for service. At SpotCrime we believe in and encourage police departments to embrace open crime data. ‘Open’ meaning the data is available in machine readable format (ex. API...