SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

I live in Smalltown, USA.  The closest airport is 2 hours away.  In fact, 2 hours is how long it takes me to get to any major city(or mall for that matter).  It’s nice living in a small town - no traffic, quiet, and feels safe.  But when I leave my small town, it’s the opposite.  Whenever I venture out of Smalltown, USA, I make sure to check out the area where I’ll be hanging out - especially the crime in the area.   I’ve found that, with the amount of technology floating around the Internet these days, this isn’t as easy as it may seem. From the airport to Smalltown, USA, it’s about 100 miles one way, about a 2 hour drive, passing through many cities/counties/jurisdictions. Where is the safest place to take a pit stop along the busy, bustling I-5 highway? If I want to learn about crime in all of the areas I pass through, I have to check out 4 different crime maps.   Yes. Four. How am I supposed to get a clear picture of crime if I have to check out four different websites?   I don’t e

In this post, I’d like to talk about the limitations of public crime maps and quasi-public-proprietary crime maps.   Don’t get me wrong, we at SpotCrime are fans of crime maps .  They are an effective tool to represent crime data and get information to the public.  But, crime maps are just one of many options of delivering useful crime data to the public. Maps in general will always have some type of dimensional limitations.  No matter how you adjust the parameters of time and distance with data on a map, it will still be just an incremental snapshot of the data set.   With crime data, if you take a too small snapshot and an area can appear to have no crime.  Take a too large of a snapshot and amount of crime data could crowd the map, show too much crime, and render the map unreadable.  Heat maps are sometimes employed to show density of data on a map, but these too have their own adjustable variances that can influence what is being projected.    Ultimately, the same limitations of a