SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Communities highlight need for crime prevention, USCs troubling delay in reporting crime, police traffic stops, inside gun detection software, Tesla police cars tested in Spokane, using tech to stop human trafficking, a billionaire's son border war, prison staff shortages among COVID, and more... POLICE CONDUCT Dayton to use mediation response for some nonviolent 911 calls  (Dayton Daily News) What do the Rural Folks Think? Perceptions of Police Performance  (Oxford Academic) The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops  (NYTimes) Central Pa. police officers fired for turning in fake COVID-19 vaccination cards: report  (PennLive.com) LMPD youth Explorer sexual abuse lawsuits settle for more than $3 million  (WDRB) USC admits to ‘troubling delay’ in warning about fraternity drugging, sex assault reports  (LATimes) Howard Buffett's Border War: A Billionaire's Son Is Spending Millions in Cochise County  (Phoenix New Times) CRIME RATE Community me...

Police budgets are used not only to hire officers, but also to purchase tech from companies to aid in police work. Anything from body cams to surveillance tech to in-car computers to RMS/CAD systems are typically hired out to a private vendor company rather than created and maintained in house by the police departments themselves. We came across a paper by Elizabeth E Joh published at the NYU School Law Review titled ’The Undue Influence of Surveillance Technology Companies on Policing’ . Joh specifically focused on the influence surveillance companies have over police departments which adversely affects policing leaving consequences for civil liberties and police oversight. This same concept can be applied to police vendors hired to house police data in Records Management System (RMS) and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems. These vendor systems are in charge of a trough of public data - from arrest records to body cam footage to crime blotters to use of force to police reports. Th...

Arnold Ventures, a non-profit with focus on criminal justice reform, recently published the report “Because the Road to Reform is Paved by Data. CAMPAIGN FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE DATA MODERNIZATION” . The report notes that effective police reform relies on gathering data in order to effectively assess the criminal justice system and support reforms and restore public trust. SpotCrime is no stranger to navigating the bureaucratic and technical divide between police agencies when it comes to collecting public crime data on a national level. All police database infrastructures are made up of different systems, making it hard to collect data on a national level. The report makes 6 recommendations, that we’ve included below, and outlines a total of 36 action items for anyone willing to tackle this problem and make data collection across jurisdictional lines seamlessly easy. The report asks for the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) to act as the overarching power to enforce data standards and pr...

Date and time is important when displaying crime data publicly for obvious reasons - the public needs to know when a crime occurred to better inform themselves. Additionally, date and time is important for any type of crime analysis over time. There are dozens of different ways to display a date and time. Every police agency addresses this differently in their crime data feeds. For example, some agencies include date and time in the same data fields, others break them apart into separate fields. Some include time, some don’t. Some write out the month, others use numbers. Some make note of the time zone, others use Unix time. Representing time is sometimes a minor headache, but not a necessarily difficult task. The SpotCrime Open Crime data Standard (SOCS) specifically addresses the date/time issue in open crime data by specifying that date and time to be split into two different data fields. The ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD standard is to be used for date and the UTC and 24 hour to be used for...

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...

Below is our paper that was recently published in The American Society of Criminology's  newsletter The Criminologist . The American Society of Criminology (ASC) is an international organization whose members pursue scholarly, scientific and professional knowledge concerning the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency. ASC publications consist of the following: the journals, Criminology and Criminology & Public Policy , and the newsletter, The Criminologist . Check out our article on page 7 of their most recent newsletter or read it below. A Call for Researchers to Embrace Robust, Open Crime Data Access to accurate and timely data on crime is important for any city wanting to uphold and improve policing. Unfortunately, although such data is increasingly being collected by cities, access to it is increasingly being restricted by private companies or by cities themselves, making it difficult if not impossible ...

SpotCrime - an independent crime mapping and crime alert service - is re-introducing SpotCrime Catapult, a free software solution that allows police departments worldwide to make their crime data public. Catapult was created by SpotCrime developers and enables any police department to export public crime data from their records management or computer aided dispatch systems.  In addition to the free software, SpotCrime is also offering any police department that implements Catapult and makes their crime data available to the public, up to $4,000 in reimbursement to defray costs of implementation.  Alternatively, SpotCrime is also willing to itself pay up to $4,000 to provide the technical services to help pull a public crime data file from any police agency's system. (Detailed terms and conditions set forth here http://bit.ly/131j4xg ). “With open data initiatives rolling out everywhere, SpotCrime wants to make it easy for police departments to release their crim...

What is Crim-Tech? You may be familiar with the term fin-tech. It stands for ‘financial technology’ and is defined as computer programs and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services. It includes services as simple as online banking and PayPal to algorithms that attempt to predict the stock market. Although technology in policing isn’t a new idea, we have begun to see an influx in the amount of technology utilized by police agencies worldwide. Because of this, we’ve decided to coin the term ‘crim-tech’.  Crim-tech stands for ‘criminal technology’ and is defined as any computer program or other technology used to support or enable policing strategies. Examples of Crim-Tech Believe it or not, crim-tech has been around at police agencies for decades and is apparent in all aspects of policing, from the initial 911 call to the time someone is arrested. Walkie talkies appeared on the force after WWII. The 911 emergency calling system came a...

Should you use year old economic data to determine the current economic stability or the unemployment rate? Would you wait a year after receiving medical information to make a decision on how to proceed with a potentially life threatening procedure? Do sports teams only look at statistics at the end of the season? No. So, why do we happily wait a year for access and the ability to analyze crime rates with UCR (Unifrom Crime Reporting) and NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System) reporting? Although well intentioned, it is our belief that UCR and NIBRS should not be data communities ask for and utilize when trying to figure how to assess crime in their neighborhood.  *Please note we are not arguing for cessation of UCR and NIBRS. If these reports have been around for so long, then they must be useful. Right? UCR and NIBRS Fall Short Timeliness: One of the problems with UCR and NIBRS reporting from the community perspective is timeliness. The reports are ...

Updates have been made to the SpotCrime ‘Live’ Crime Data Transparency Ranking list. Only 1 city was upgraded to a 2 ranking - Baltimore. They added a calls for service and arrest data feeds after the Freddie Grey protests. 5 cities were downgraded. The recurring reason for the decrease in transparency across the country? Police system ‘upgrades’. The new year has brought dozens of RMS/CAD/database upgrades to police departments nationwide. It’s great to see agencies embracing new technology, however, these new upgrades are knocking public access to crime information offline. Boston, MA - 2 to a 0  BPD is no longer updating the open data feed due to RMS upgrade . No timeline has been given as to when the feed will be available again. Phoenix, AZ - 2 to a 1   The Phoenix  RMS upgrade knocked a weekly public file offline and dramatically decreased the the timeliness and quality of the data. St. Louis County, MO - 2 to a 0   St....

SpotCrime  continues to be the only major crime mapping company to break out shootings into it’s own icon. Often it is very difficult to identify that a shooting has happened from the crime data we receive. A lot of the time, we are left to using the description associated with an incident (given there is a description provided) to determine if a shooting occurred.  Most crime mapping sites will map a shooting with some sort of assault icon. This causes shootings to get lost - filed under the same icon as fist fights, knife attacks, kidnappings, and verbal assaults. We believe this does not give a full picture of crime in the area. We rely on open crime incident data sets, RMS data, CAD data, UCR data and/or a mix of the bunch. It just depends on what agencies make available. Not all agencies make the same data available. The inconsistency in datasets from agency to agency and jurisdiction to jurisdiction has also made this task incredibly difficult. Thi...

The low hanging fruit for police agencies in the open data movement is opening up incident based RMS/CAD data. Typically RMS/CAD data is available, it’s just not in an open, machine readable format yet.  Here are 5 great reasons to make your police incident data open - meaning it’s made available in a machine readable format for anyone to collect, use, and share. 5) Proactively answer FOIAs By being proactive and making data available in an open format, it will create a one-stop shop for FOIA requests - lessening the time, money, and resources it takes to respond to hundreds of FOIA requests for the same information. 4) Apps!  And not to mention FREE apps! Making the data openly available creates more opportunities for entrepreneurs to do something useful with the information. Something a police agency may not have the time or resources to commit their time to or afford. Check out the free SpotCrime apps for iPhone , Android , and Kindle Fire . 3) Th...