SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Yelp - the crowdsourced restaurant review website - has helped make restaurant inspection data more accessible in the US reducing the risk of food borne illnesses . Most notably by establishing LIVES , a standard that unlocks restaurant inspection data typically held at the city and state level. A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review describes how Yelp (and LIVES) creates a level of transparency that raises accountability by giving consumers the power to make better decisions with health inspection data. Yelp found that once businesses became aware that consumers had access to data, they responded better to low ratings - 'In one large city, we showed in a randomized, controlled trial that restaurants whose low hygiene ratings are posted on Yelp tend to respond by cleaning up and performing better on their next inspections.’ Likewise, we believe a similar positive effect can come from opening up crime data. Just as residents want to know hygiene information ab...

There are already methods for agencies to share information among each other like N-Dex , NEIM , GJXDM . But what about sharing information openly with the public? Currently, Baltimore shares data differently than Baltimore County who shares it differently than Annapolis, MD who shares it differently than Arlington, VA who shares it differently than Dallas, TX who shares it differently than LA who shares it differently than Vancouver, BC who shares it differently than London, England. Until now. We’ve created the SpotCrime Open Crime Standard (SOCS) to encourage police agencies throughout the world to keep crime public data uniform, simple, and ubiquitous. We’ve also created the standard to set guidelines for making public crime information open and accessible to the public. Similar to LIVES with health inspection data or GTFS with transit data, the SpotCrime Open Crime Standard (SOCS) will allow agencies to report the same kind of information to the public openly, causi...