SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

We’ve got crime coast to coast covered in America (and across the pond, too!). Yes, Canada is in the same America as Boston - the continent of North America that is! We started mapping Nanaimo, a city just west of Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada on Vancouver Island. Open data has picked up in the US, and it’s taking charge in Canada as well. The city, along with other Canadian cities, has crime information on their website. The police are using the crime map they’ve created to open a dialog with residents next week . Head back east into the States to Boston and check Boston open crime data on SpotCrime . Boston recently saw a hike in homicides this January, but as James Allan Fox points out in an article published Boston.com, comparing crime month to month instead of an overall or yearly comparison might paint the wrong picture. He’s dubbed this approach a ‘Chicken Little’ approach when a sudden increase in crime is assumed to signal a trend, when it doesn’t. Fox’s po

In addition to other published data, SpotCrime is now mapping tweets from the Boston PD. This is being done in near real time. The twitter address for the Boston police is twitter.com/Boston_Police . To see the data in and around Boston, click on the SpotCrime link below: http://www.spotcrime.com/ma/boston

This map is of the shooting that Spotcrime has reported in 2008 that have occurred in Boston. To see all the incidents that have taken place in Boston in the since the beginning of the year, go to: http://spotcrime.com/ma/boston .

The above crime map is from SpotCrime 's Boston Mashup. It contains all the shootings we've been able to map in Boston this year so far.

The following is shooting data SpotCrime has been able to collect for 2008.