Kalamazoo Restricts Access to Public Crime Data

Public data belongs in the hands of the public.

Not in Kalamazoo currently.

Kalamazoo Police Department recently shut down their open, unrestricted crime data feed and moved to to a closed, proprietary third party crime mapping website.

Open, unrestricted crime data feed

Here is what an open, unrestricted public crime data feed looks like on an independently run crime map.

And here is what a closed, proprietary public crime data feed looks like on an independently run crime map.

Notice a difference?

No, crime didn’t decrease with a new crime map.

No, the police department didn’t stop responding to calls.

The difference is data is no longer openly available in Kalamazoo for the public and press to collect use, and share.

Instead, if you want to see what crime is happening in Kalamazoo, the only way to do so is to head to the new crime mapping website that places restrictions on how the public and press can use the public crime data that appears on their site.

But, if you’d like to tabulate the data yourself, report on it, share the data - you can’t (without the threat of legal issues). The control of public crime data has been placed into the hands of a third party crime mapping website. 

The terms of use on the new crime maps website prevents the public and press from handling the data themselves. One of the restrictions states no one can ‘g. Manually or systematically harvest information or data contained within Omega Services;’

Why would any police department want to prevent the public and press from writing down and sharing information?

Is Kalamazoo hiding crime data?

Not exactly. But, no one can actually hold on to the data and compare it for validity themselves. 

Take for example, this press release.

This data point appears to be mapped on the vendor website as a marijuana arrest.

And here is that same incident mapped on SpotCrime, but as a shooting.

Why are they different?

SpotCrime mapped it as a shooting because, according to the press release, shots were fired. As an independent news organization, we break out shootings because our subscribers find this to be valuable information. 

It may be that these are in fact two different incidents. If so, why didn’t the shots fired incident end up on the new crime mapping website?

Is Kalamazoo hiding something?

Deniability is much easier without transparency, but we have no reason to believe Kalamazoo police department is trying to hide anything. However, if so inclined, it would be much easier to do so the way crime data is being released now.

We aren’t complaining about how a third party runs their own private website. Using a vendor site is not as bad as providing no crime information at all. 

It is disheartening when a city has been open with their data for so long, decides to upgrade to something that is significantly worse. How can deploying new technology give the public less choice and access? Would anyone accept a new phone after five years that had less features than the older phone?

Instead, we are trying to explain that placing the control of providing the public with crime information needs to be placed into the hands of the taxpayers - the public and press - not a private company. 

There is no true transparency with a third party because the data can be adjusted at the client's [police department's] request while preventing the public and the press from maintaining a comparative database.

An open data feed - a feed without restrictions on collecting, using, or sharing the data - is more transparent and beneficial to the public, press, and police than the publicly view-only website that Kalamazoo is currently using (or any crime mapping website for that matter). 

What do other cities do?

As the Kalamazoo Police Department mentions in their press release, both Detroit and Ann Arbor used the same vendor. But both cities also make their data public and unrestricted - why? 

In Detroit’s case, it is likely a result of Federal oversight that encouraged transparency in order to improve the quality of a troubled police department. 

For Ann Arbor, it is likely an intelligent response to improve public trust and add the most requested data set to an open data portal. 

For Kalamazoo, our expectation for open access to crime data will come with some type of Federal Review or a new administration that values transparency and the partnership with the public over the partnership with a vendor. 

Another way to look at it - if Detroit is making their data open, then why isn’t Kalamazoo?

Transparency is not the only corollary to agencies improving their quality of community policing. But reducing transparency is definitely a potential indicator of declining quality of community policing. We have never seen any agency improve the quality of community policing by choosing one vendor to have monopoly control of distributing and regulating access to public crime data.