O CANADA: Your Crime Maps Need Some Work.
Good news: we are seeing more Canadian agencies make an attempt to move toward increased transparency within their police agencies. A few Canadian cities have released their own versions of crime maps. The bad news is the maps they are creating could be way better. Three ways Canada can make better crime maps: Open (and machine readable) : To start, each map should come with some sort of open, machine readable data feed. This will allow the data to be easily consumed by anyone. Only a few of the maps do this currently. Date : The data included on the maps could be better. One city doesn’t give a specific date, just a range. Another city only gives the month. Some cities provide data months behind. Location : Some sort of address should be included. We’ve found typically in Canada the icons/addresses are anonymized and sometimes moved blocks away. Anonymizing sensitive isn’t a bad thing and is needed in order to help protect victims. Moving crime incidents blocks a...