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| Crime in Rockford, IL |
Rockford is the third largest city in Illinois with a population of about 150k. The city is located in rural central-north Illinois, just south of the Wisconsin border.
According to the recent reports SpotCrime receives from local police agencies, crime overall in Rockford, Illinois is currently down by 20% when compared to the previous month.
Property crime such as theft, vandalism, and burglary is down. Fortunately, property crime and overall crime have both decreased this month, with property crime decreasing by 0% when compared to the previous month.
Violent crime including shootings, assaults, and robberies is also down. Fortunately, violent crime and overall crime have both decreased this month, with violent crime decreasing by 16% when compared to the previous month.
About 5 years ago, Rockford police department's crime mapping vendor notified us that we were no longer allowed to use their website to collect public crime information.
We attempted to get RPD to release crime data openly with no avail. This meant the RPD was giving preferential access to crime information to a third party over the press. Denying open access to crime data was a huge step backwards in transparency.
Fast forward about 5 years and we noticed that Rockford 911 and incident data is being published to the Illinois state open data portal! This is great news and a pat on the back for RPD for sharing their crime data openly!
Our hope is that RPD continues to feed data to the open data website (but there is no guarantee this will continue to happen).
We aren't sure what prompted the data feed to be made open. Agencies nationwide are releasing crime data sets in order to be more transparent with their communities, and in accordance with the White House Police Data Initiative, so RPD may be following a nationwide trend. We hope other agencies in the area follow RPD's example.
Is your police department releasing data openly? Let us know! We will map it and send out email alerts for free!
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