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 fo...

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. ...

Examiner article here It would seem the marginal cost of sharing data once a police agency has formated their data for one outlet would be very small. SpotCrime is capable of converting most any data format. Additionally, SpotCrime has already been called more accurate by an independent technology expert. We are encouraged by any police department that is taking steps to make their data more public. We caution that with the decreased cost of technology and free tools provided by Google that they do not overspend for long term consulting agreements. An alternative approach would be distribute the data publicly through the internet allowing multiple organizations to map and analyze the data. Many cities in the US are following this example including Washington DC, Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago and Dallas. SpotCrime contends that there are potentially many more benefits to making crime data fully public. New discoveries and platforms for this data are only hampered when data is held hosta...