2015: The Year of Open Crime Data
Every police agency has options on how to bring crime information to the public. For example, the AMBER Alert tool is almost universally used. The idea is that if a child is taken an alert is sent to anyone and everyone so the quicker the information gets to the public the better of saving the child and reducing harm to the child. (EDIT: A couple of days after we published this post, Facebook announced their AMBER Alert program !) Not all crime events can have the same urgency as an AMBER alert - there's a huge difference between the robbery around the corner and an AMBER alert - but why should your access to these two pieces of information be different. All crime information can have the same level of openness - meaning the ability of the press and the public to use, share, and distribute the information is equal. Police agencies have varying degrees of sharing crime data. We've summed them up into four: 1. Agencies don't share much at all. The occa