SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

This week we've been working on re-establishing open crime data in Toronto, Ontario, Canada . The Toronto PD turned off their easily and freely accessible crime data feed. We've received word that the police thought it provided and inaccurate picture of crime data in the city. However, their current way to inform citizens of crime is pretty dismal. Currently, the only way to see crime data in Toronto is to create and sign in to a news release account on the police department's website. You can sign up to receive the news releases via email, which is what we've done and what we'll be mapping in the meantime. Unfortunately, we've found that some of the news releases read more like a Buzzfeed clickbait soap opera than a news story.  Why not include all of the details in an email? Especially when not everyone can make it to a press conference or catch the press conference on TV? This is bad news because now the police have slowed down and almost completel

Puerto Rico crime map screen shot of San Juan SpotCrime is mapping crime in Puerto Rico ! Check out this screen shot our Puerto Rico crime map. Puerto Rico is the US territory in the Caribbean meaning people born in Puerto Rico are natural-born US citizens and if you're a US citizen you don't need a passport to visit! The population is about 3.5 million people! Major cities include San Juan (the capital), Bayamon, Carolina, Ponce, and Caguas. The crime data feed SpotCrime is using includes data for all of those cities. You may notice there we do not have specific addresses listed. This is because the source only provides lat/long coordinates, however if you zoom in on the Google map, you'll be able to see the street names. Did you know that lat/long coordinates are pretty efficient and our tech team actually prefers them over addresses? In a perfect world, both addresses and lat/long are provided. Make sure to sign up for your local crime alert to stay informed o

We mapped some recent crime data files from Frederick, MD ! Check out the map below Frederick is the county seat of Frederick County located in Western Maryland. It's the second most populated incorporated city in Maryland, behind our hometown - Baltimore, MD . Interestingly, a Frederick crime is always a top 25 most viewed crime on SpotCrime. Since the Frederick PD doesn't post their crime data openly or have an open data portal we're working on collecting up to date crime data from Frederick. Keep checking back for updates or sign up for a Frederick area crime alert. We'll notify you with an email alert with there has been an update. Stay aware, stay safe!

You can now view up to date crime data in Detroit, MI in SpotCrime! The Motor City is the most populated city in Michigan with over 5.2 million people in the Detroit metro area. We've started mapping up to date crime data in Detroit, a city that has notoriously been low on the crime data transparency scale. Due to the increase in transparency, we've moved them to a 2 ranking (that's the best rank to get!) on our city crime data transparency scale ! Economically making Detroit data open makes sense. Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013 and exited bankruptcy in December 2014.  A McKinsey report published in 2013 estimated that, in addition to empowering citizens and improving the delivery of public services, open data has many economic benefits including giving the rise to entrepreneurial businesses and helping companies segment markets and improve efficiency. McKinsey report also estimated that open data can generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional revenue

Periodically, SpotCrime will look at historical crime data and create our “crimelist” maps. For this one, we looked at all the open, unsolved crimes for 2014 in Plano, TX. Here’s the link to the Plano Police website with the crimes listed. Check out this link for the SpotCrime Crimelist of the unsolved crimes mapped.  Help Solve These Crimes If you have any information that can help us solve any of the following crimes, please contact the North Texas Crime Stoppers .