SpotCrime Surpasses Half a Million Subscribers - Online Source for Crime Data Most Visited Crime Mapping Service Worldwide

BALTIMORE, MD (12/11/12) --- SpotCrime – the most comprehensive online source for crime data – has surpassed 500,000 subscribers just prior to the end of 2012, making the Baltimore-based company the most visited crime mapping site in the world.

“Nearly 55 percent of online users looking for incident details and crime mapping information now turn to SpotCrime,” says the company’s Founder and President, Colin Drane.  “That’s more than double our nearest competitor and has resulted in SpotCrime sending an average of 165,000 crime alert emails per day or more than five million email
alerts monthly.”

In addition, SpotCrime has become the most liked crime map on Facebook, garnering more than 70 percent of Facebook “likes.”

The company anticipates those numbers will increase in the future due to recent expansions of its partnerships with two of the country’s largest media companies, Sinclair and Gannett. Those partnerships mean that television stations in 15 additional markets  throughout the U.S. – including Atlanta, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Sacramento, and  Washington, D.C. – will now carry crime data generated by SpotCrime on their websites.

In addition, SpotCrime's "MyLocalCrime" brand has been chosen by the national news site Topix.com as its sole provider for crime maps. Topix's viewers can now easily access a crime map for every section of the U.S.

SpotCrime’s “Crime Transparency Model™” enables it to pull crime incident data from multiple sources in close to real time, including local county and city police departments and validated news sources, to produce a comprehensive and accurate record of local crime information and locations.

“The idea for SpotCrime came about because I felt very strongly that the more people who are aware of what is occurring in their communities, the higher the chance that a community will be proactive in the fight against crime,” says Drane.

Drane’s original idea has made it one of the most visited hyperlocal news sites on the web.  With continued subscriber growth and retention, the company’s website and other applications now have a 5-year proven track record of effectively engaging the public with timely, relevant crime information.“SpotCrime’s intent has always been to provide access to all relevant crime information, spurring citizen interaction,” Drane explains. “I believe our growth relative to our competitors speaks to the power of that agenda.”

Noting that neighborhoods and communities throughout the country are taking full advantage of the power of the Internet, sharing SpotCrime emails, and discussing crime data with each other, Drane adds, “In some cases, we’ve seen one of our emails shared with hundreds of neighbors at a time, increasing the reach of that information exponentially and generating greater awareness that, I believe, ultimately will drive new measures that lead to a reduction in crime.”

Since it was founded in 2007, SpotCrime has employed numerous mechanisms to increase user access to the crime data it gathers. While SpotCrime has continued to attract subscribers through partnerships with major U.S. media companies, the company has also launched an iPhone application which allows users to obtain detailed descriptions of the crimes listed and share crime incidents with others via email.

Two years ago, SpotCrime forged a relationship with DIRECTV, where DIRECTV viewers made SpotCrime’s TV App the fastest growing application offered by the popular video service, surpassing even Facebook.

Earlier this year, SpotCrime offered to map crime data for any police department in the country that requests it, at no charge. That decision came about after Drane discovered that some of his competitors were charging police agencies for exclusive mapping services then reselling that crime data for commercial purposes.

“Knowing how much people need that crime data to avoid harm to person or property, we wanted to make our crime mapping services freely available without locking police departments into restrictive contracts with a single vendor,” notes Drane.

“Mapping crime data transparently for police departments will help meet the public’s increasing demand for accurate, up-to-date crime data, allowing departments to devote more of their budgets to putting police on the street,” Drane concludes.

For more information about SpotCrime, visit the company’s website at www.spotcrime.com.