Removing Crimes from SpotCrime

We rarely remove crimes from SpotCrime.  Our general premise is that once they are made public, they should be public for everyone.  

We do remove crimes that have been mapped incorrectly - which is a topic for another post, but suffice to say, when our computers locate a crime on the wrong street and we discover it - the crime is immediately corrected or removed.

Over the weekend we removed three types of crimes that later did not fit our mission of notifying the public of crime events.  

The first was a reported abduction in Coeur d'Alene Idaho.  Someone reported a child getting off a bicycle, leaving the bicycle and getting into a van.  We mapped the crime immediately, but later the Coeur d'Alene police indicated it was a false alarm on their Facebook Page.   We don't often map crimes in Coeur d'Alene because police department has chosen a proprietary system that blocks the press from access.  We feel this is a great example of a police department favoring the relationship with the vendor over the relationship with the public.  

The second crime was from Frederick Maryland.  A citizen had reported being stabbed at a local park.  Later the Frederick Police discovered the stab wounds were self inflicted.  Naturally, we removed the crime.  We'd like to map more crime in Frederick, but the Police Department has elected to use the same proprietary method of informing the public.  

The third crime was a self inflicted gun shot wound.  At SpotCrime, we take extra effort to identify when a person has intended to shoot at another person.   The exception is when it is an attempted suicide.   We are very sorry for anyone who decides taking their own life is a solution to anything.

 

I all three instances, the crimes were removed because the information was updated - and no longer was a criminal incident.  This may be a reason why some departments are reluctant to release crime data to the public.  They are afraid that when incidents get updated in their system and on pinned on the map, the first reported incident is the one that is remembered by residents.  An issue we explain here 911 Call Data v Police Recorded data.

 

Don't see your city on the map?  Reach out to your police department and ask them to send their data to SpotCrime.  If they send us data, we will map it and send alerts for free.