The Value of an Open Crime Standard

The value of implementing and using an open crime data standard is endless. That’s why we created the SpotCrime Open Crime Standard (SOCS).

Here’s an example how SOCS can help. Three cities have recently announced their availability of crime data to the public - Toledo, Columbus, and Indianapolis. 

If you were to check out each city’s crime data source, you’ll find that three cities use different approaches and methodologies in releasing public crime data. And, only Columbus provides an open data table.

SOCS solves all three of these city’s issues by not only encouraging agencies to release crime data openly, but standardizing how agencies open up and create crime data feeds. It also encourages police departments to give the public and the press all the data - not just snippets. 

Toledo announced the release of their new crime map this past month. The map limits the radius that can be searched (to ½ mile) and you can’t access the data in an open format. If you want to see the data for the city as a whole or even a mile down the road it’s nearly impossible.

Columbus recently restored their open data feed. The application works like a table listing of crime incidents. We refer to this table as ‘somewhat’ open because the pagination on the table is restricted, however the search is not limited so it makes it much better than something like Toledo. 

Indianapolis uses a mapping application called MapIndy. Functionally, we’ve found that the map hides the crime data layer. Because of this and Indianapolis's recent announcement of contracting with a proprietary vendor, Indy is probably the worst offender of the three.

We didn’t create SOCS to discourage ways of displaying data. All three cities may have good explanations for their choices. Instead we created SOCS with the intention to help normalize the data across multiple cities. SOCS’s purpose is to help agencies make the data open while still being able to have their own preference of how they display the feed to the public. 

In a perfect world (and we believe in the near future) all of these cities will decide to release crime data in an open and unrestricted format. This will allow the public and press better access to crime data giving them the ability to better understand what happens in their city and other cities around them*.

This doesn’t mean that the police agency can’t choose a controlled vendor to display the data how they want. It just means the public and the press should get the same fair, open and standard access as the contracted vendor - particularly when the costs to provide this data openly is nearly zero ($0). 

Quite possibly, the push for open data helps internal sharing as well. Historically, police agencies have been notoriously poor at sharing data among themselves. By standardizing the data to the public, it is likely that the data becomes more standardized and easy to use/share internally amongst agencies. 

*We would like to note that there are complexities even when SOCS or any open crime format standard is used in terms of the source of the data (CAD vs RMS data). We don’t want to minimize the inherent complexities in reporting, classifying, and recording crime data. But, using a standard format can better explain the difference in the data source, classification, and validity.