SpotCrime Testimony from MD Open Data Bill SB644

Last March, SpotCrime was asked to testify on the Maryland Open Data Bill SB644. You can read more about the bill and follow it on OpenStates.

The bill, which was passed in April 2014 and took effect June 2014, establishes the Council on Open Data, which is tasked with promoting the policy of the State that open data be machine readable and released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable, including through the use of open data portals.

Our testimony is below. We hope publishing the testimony helps others who are trying to create open data legislation in their city or state.

Written Testimony Senate Bill SB644 March 2014



Oral Testimony given by Colin Drane, SpotCrime founder, March 2014

Thank you for your time today.

Colin Drane, Founder SpotCrime.com, a Baltimore based public facing crime mapping website. Currently we are the most visited crime mapping website in the US with over 1 m. unique views a month and over 8 m. crime alert emails sent a month. This year we expect to send over 120 m. crime alerts to the public.

We started seven years ago with very little capital and currently employ four direct staff and a additional technical team of six people. SpotCrime represents a new type of company that is profitable and relies extensively on access to public data.

I think it is important to mention that when I started SpotCrime - I had no technical experience, and no background in law enforcement. I was able to grow the company because of the good fortune of living in a time when crime data was becoming open and computing cost were declining rapidly. The same economies that are available to my private enterprise are now equally available to these police agencies.

I would like to speak to you today regarding my knowledge of the current state of access to crime data in Maryland and the benefit of making the data available in a machine readable format.

Of the agencies making data available to Spotcrime or the public, the data structure and timeliness is very disparate. Timeliness varies from some agencies providing daily with little delay to monthly with a minimum of a week lag. Data structure can vary from fully mapped information with latitude and longitude to difficult to read website reports in paragraph form.

SpotCrime attempts to normalize this variable data for everyone who visits our website. 

For those agencies not making their data available, SpotCrime attempts to obtain data by making contact with the agency, asking for the data, and explaining the benefits of providing the data publicly.

Many Maryland agencies continually refuse and/or ignore our requests for data. We employ a Shaw-shank Redemption approach to these agencies. Every few months we ask again, and have done so since the company started.

Of the agencies that continually refuse open access, many make data viewable through proprietary means. This means they employ a vendor to display the data on a map, but allow the vendor to restrict the press and public from sharing the data. These proprietary systems specifically state that the press and the public cannot openly share the crime data - rendering the data less than transparent and open. However, by using a proprietary vendor to display data, one can infer that the agency has the ability to export the data openly with minimal expense.

This bill would hopefully standardize how crime data is released statewide and encourage police agencies to move away from proprietary public facing systems.

By making the data public, companies like SpotCrime can rebroadcast the data to the public at a much higher rate / efficiency than a single source proprietary system. The thought being that no one outlet can reach everyone with information, but many providers can inform more citizens faster.

This bill also would allow for continuity of the crime data. As an example, Anne Arundel County had a interruption in making data available two years ago because of a change in database systems. This data still has not returned.

By making the data standard and timely, all Marylanders can get a similar experience of crime information and be informed at the same rate of speed.

In the case of Anne Arundel County and the City of Frederick, SpotCrime maps available press releases regarding high profile crimes that the agency wishes to publish. This, however, represents a very small percentage of incidents that happen each day.

Essentially, the press releases become arbitrary in terms of available information. They are informative, but do not represent the entire picture.

As a citizen, I am interested in the shooting that happened near the connivence store in the next town, but I am likely more interested in the burglary that happened around the corner from my house.

Providing open crime data gives each citizen a more accurate picture of crime in their neighborhood - particularly if they live on a dividing line between two jurisdictions. Currently, any citizen living near a county or city border will get a uneven picture of crime because either one or both agencies do not openly report and or they report at a different rate and different philosophy of what should be public.

Often concerns about privacy are brought up related to crime data.

I would submit that most of this data is eventually mined by private law firms and bail bonds in order to market their services. The data is readily available to these business, but not easily accessible by the public.

Additionally, the convention to make the data available is to screen for juvenile crimes and to de-identify the address by only showing the block number. In our experience, most agencies already have reports that make these filters and/or the cost of filtering this for the public is very small.

As a person who has lived and breathed public crime mapping and data access for the last six years, and responded to our customer inquires daily. I have first hand knowledge that the demand for this data is high and that when the data is not available, it is often viewed as being deliberately withheld.

Conversely, where the data is available, we see communities self organize organically to share the information and become active in their communities. Making the data fully open without proprietary restrictions removes any artificial restrictions on the press, and allows the public to be active and informed.

Around the country, SpotCrime has helped agencies surface their crime data to the public with negligible costs. Base on these experiences, it is my view that this bill’s affect on surfacing crime data is also minimal.

It is my belief that fostering neighborhood watches through open data engagement reduces crime and reduces the economic costs of crime.