SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Compared to a couple of years ago, there has been exponential growth in the number of cities opening up crime data. How should success be measured? We’ve checked out Chicago and Louisville - two cities who have been publishing crime data openly for a couple of years - to see what’s being done with data.  These cities are successful with crime data because: Not only is the data available to view without anyone having to ask for it or restrictions on the ability to collect, use, and share It’s being used by many different people, companies, websites, and apps! Not surprisingly, we aren’t the only crime map in town! In addition to SpotCrime, there are other privately run crime maps as well as news agencies digesting the data. And interestingly, crime mapping vendor websites that typically charge for services seem to be mapping Chicago and Louisville crime data for free.  By providing open crime data, and because companies like SpotCrime map crime for the public ...

The low hanging fruit for police agencies in the open data movement is opening up incident based RMS/CAD data. Typically RMS/CAD data is available, it’s just not in an open, machine readable format yet.  Here are 5 great reasons to make your police incident data open - meaning it’s made available in a machine readable format for anyone to collect, use, and share. 5) Proactively answer FOIAs By being proactive and making data available in an open format, it will create a one-stop shop for FOIA requests - lessening the time, money, and resources it takes to respond to hundreds of FOIA requests for the same information. 4) Apps!  And not to mention FREE apps! Making the data openly available creates more opportunities for entrepreneurs to do something useful with the information. Something a police agency may not have the time or resources to commit their time to or afford. Check out the free SpotCrime apps for iPhone , Android , and Kindle Fire . 3) Th...

A ‘release to one, release to all’ federal initiative pilot program will be rolled out in the next 6 months by a handful of federal agencies. Under the initiative any member of the public will presumably have access to the result of almost any FOIA request to the participating agencies. A few journalists have expressed concern over the idea , some in fear investigative stories will be harder to write, others concerned that the public will now have access to a every single FOIA they file. Some journalists suggested a small head start for the original FOIA requester would be fair. This line of thinking doesn’t resonate well with the premise of open data. Especially open crime data. However, this thinking is similar to what is happening with crime data and crime mapping vendors. Crime mapping vendors across the country are regularly granted access to a more up-to-date crime data feed than the public. In Durham, NC the vendor gets a more up-to-date feed than the Du...