SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Emergency call times, police staffing shortage, red flag laws, illegal guns, San Fran robots that can kill, biometric surveillance, corporate crime data, body cams, NY prison racial disparity, college in prison, and more... POLICE CONDUCT CMPD shares more insight about long emergency call times  (WCNC) Are Police Helicopter Fleets Worth the Money?  (Mother Jones) Janet Lauritsen issues call to modernize nation’s crime statistics during presidential address at American Society of Criminology conference  (UMSL.edu) Police forces scramble to fill vacancies as crime rises CRIME RATE 19 states have red flag laws, but they are rarely used to stop gun violence  (Poynter) Why crime data may not present an accurate picture  (KSMU) Where are the criminals in Rochester getting their illegal guns?  (WHEC) CRIM-TECH San Francisco will allow police to deploy robots that kill  (AP News) A conversation on AI-powered gunshot detection with a police technology expert ...

One of the biggest drivers behind the current police reform demands in the US is police data . There are a myriad of police datasets available within a police department that paint a picture of the inner workings and behavior of its officers with the public. There are many different datasets circulating within a police agency. One of the least ‘sensitive’ data points (the lowest hanging fruit) is the data SpotCrime asks for from police agencies nationwide - Records Management System (RMS) data and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD/911) data. This data has been around and released to the media and public for centuries . It includes what is known as a ‘crime blotter’ - a list of what and where crime occurs throughout the day within a police jurisdiction and what where and when police respond to the public’s calls for service. At SpotCrime we believe in and encourage police departments to embrace open crime data. ‘Open’ meaning the data is available in machine readable format (ex. API...

KY first to use rapid DNA rape test kits, predictive policing AI and racial profiling, crime rate and homelessness correlation, TN attempts to make 911 data confidential, open data in Irving, and more... POLICE CONDUCT ShotSpotter Tells Louisville Police About Gunshots, But Officers Rarely Look For Evidence  (KYCIR.org) Police departments look to residents as 'smart' doorbells rise in popularity  (KSDK) Michigan State Police captain retires to work for software vendor he supervised  (Detroit Free Press) Can predictive policing help stamp out racial profiling?  (BostonGlobe) see also:  AI-Based Crime Tools Aren't the Problem. The Biased Data They Use Is.  (Law.com) DOJ grants management program funds for crime reduction, victim services initiatives  (FederalNewsNetwork) Los Angeles Police End Second Data-Driven Crime Program Targeting Violent Offenders  (TechWire) Unverified, outdated police gang database lists 134,000 names, watchdo...

We rarely remove crimes from SpotCrime .  Our general premise is that once they are made public, they should be public for everyone.   We do remove crimes that have been mapped incorrectly - which is a topic for another post, but suffice to say, when our computers locate a crime on the wrong street and we discover it - the crime is immediately corrected or removed. Over the weekend we removed three types of crimes that later did not fit our mission of notifying the public of crime events.   The first was a reported abduction in   Coeur d'Alene Idaho .  Someone reported a child getting off a bicycle, leaving the bicycle and getting into a van.  We mapped the crime immediately, but later the Coeur d'Alene police indicated it was a false alarm on their Facebook Page .   We don't often map crimes in Coeur d'Alene because police department has chosen a proprietary system that blocks the press from access.  We feel this...

We get this question all of the time from SpotCrime users - what is the different between call data and police recorded ?  Here's a brief explanation of the two. 911 Call Data Departments across the country have different names for 911 call data.  It can range from ‘911 call data’ to ‘calls for service’ to ‘CAD data’ and many more. 911 call data includes any data pulled from a department’s CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system. Typical CAD companies used by departments include Intergraph , Spillman , SunGard , Tiburon , USA-Software , and New World Systems . 911 call data includes any call into a police department that requires action by an officer. It is the raw, immediate data that represents the first record of an incident.  Many police departments - like Dallas , Tulsa , Columbus , San Antonio, Hillsborough County , and Tampa (to name a few) - have started to release their CAD data in an open feed format available to the public. A benefit of 911 call data is ...