The Crowd Sourced Crime Analyst

One of the main goals for SpotCrime is to get crime information to as much of the public as possible.  Engagement is our motto.  And you don't need to believe we are doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, we have a business model around our approach - like any news organization we have ads around the content we provide.  Get more people to view the content, and increase the amount of ads we can show.  

Any system that provides incentives is susceptible to being gamed, and our ad model should be scrutinized just like any other.  However, since we do not charge police departments for the service and have no financial ties to the police agency, we ask that you measure your scrutiny with our independence and our success of reaching the public.  Currently, SpotCrime reaches more people with crime data than any other system in the world.

We feel there are many benefits to encouraging police departments to be transparent and timely with their crime data.   And we are encouraged that more agencies are eschewing the antiquated model of proprietary systems for an open approach to releasing data.   Open systems inherently reach more of the public because the data can easily be shared and accessed by everyone.  Closed proprietary systems create artificial friction on access that typically benefit the vendor to the detriment of the public.  For this post we like to discuss the potential benefits of reaching many eyes with current crime information.  

We'd like to make the argument that a vigilantly informed community is a safer community and can provide positive feedback to the police agency through an open exchange of information.  First, we like to reference the popular book by James Michael Surowiecki   -  The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, which argues under the right circumstances the crowd can be smarter than the few.   Note the qualification "right circumstances".  This is not to say the crowd is smarter than crime analysts, but possibly that engaging the crowd with its diversity and massive processing power might help identify and reduce crime.   Informing the public openly with crime information may help crime analysts do their job by providing an informative feedback loop of information.  

Currently there seems to be particular interest on using crime data to deploy police resources to fight crime.  Simply put, find the crime hot spots and deploy resources to those areas which will ultimately reduce the crime rate.    Some now argue that New York City's staggering reduction in crime was influenced less by the Borken-Windows approach and more by data driven crime fighting process that came from CompStat.  By focusing on hot spots, police not only catch the criminals but disincentivize criminal activity through their presence.  

We like to argue that the next seismic shift in crime fighting will come with added community involvement.   By sharing timely data with the community and allowing the community to openly share the information, quicker information can be garnered from the many incidents that come into a department daily.  Crime analysts are fantastic at noticing trends in data - it is their job - but when the data gets bigger and bigger and resources get thinner with strained budgets there are likely two options to choose.  The first, and a topic for another post, is expensive big data analysis using SAS type technology to process crime information quickly and coherently.   The second, and the purpose of this post, is to allow as much information as possible to reach the public.  It is likely that whatever is released can be enriched with many eyes viewing the data and commenting on the events.   We can't predict how the data will be used positively by the public, but we can estimate that there's a probability of a positive outcome if the data can reach the public quickly.  

How are these positive feedback loops created?  How will open releases of timely crime data produce better policing?  We at SpotCrime have some thoughts, but it is still too early to tell.  We do know that we'd like SpotCrime to be part of the process.   But the optimal solution is not yet known.  A better approach would be to allow the data to be free to the public without restrictions and then determine what is working.  

In our view, criminals have no restrictions on how they share information and coordinate their activities.   Why put restrictions on the law abiding public?  Let's use the openness of the internet and social media as a tool to engage the community and help further reduce crime - fostering trust and willing participation.