Ask Your Police Agency to be Open with Crime Data
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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 vendor might place on the information. And, the data will be machine readable - making it easy to search, use, and share. Not posting openly can diminish the virality of the information and hinder the access to important crime fighting information which helps keeps neighborhoods safe.
2 - Cost Savings. Open crime data will allow for savings on costs typically associated with open records requests for the information - personnel, time, papers, copies, etc. And, the police department will get resources and apps for free (like SpotCrime)!
3 - Reuse and redistribution. Open crime data will allow residents and developers to create cool and useful (and free) ways to use the crime information.
4- Finally, transparency and trust with agency and residents. Crime data is a great way to garner trust and to show residents how agencies are being transparent.
Is your police agency not sure what kind of information to submit? Feel free to send them the SpotCrime open crime data standard and guidelines.
In an attempt to allow agencies to report the same kind of information to the public openly, we’ve been working on a standard and guidelines explaining what crime information should be released and how.
A crime data standard will cause cause less confusion from agency to agency. We believe applying this standard will not only help agencies collaborate, but will help close the gap between desire and ability for developers and residents. It will also allow for local crime data to be easier understood at any level whether it’s locally, countywide, regionally, statewide, nationally, or internationally.
Finally, If your city doesn’t have an open data site or has no idea what open data is, check out resources like Code For America, Open Knowledge Foundation, The Sunlight Foundation, or The GovLab. They'd be more than willing to help your city learn how to become more open with it's data.
A crime data standard will cause cause less confusion from agency to agency. We believe applying this standard will not only help agencies collaborate, but will help close the gap between desire and ability for developers and residents. It will also allow for local crime data to be easier understood at any level whether it’s locally, countywide, regionally, statewide, nationally, or internationally.
Finally, If your city doesn’t have an open data site or has no idea what open data is, check out resources like Code For America, Open Knowledge Foundation, The Sunlight Foundation, or The GovLab. They'd be more than willing to help your city learn how to become more open with it's data.
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