SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

We rarely remove crimes from SpotCrime .  Our general premise is that once they are made public, they should be public for everyone.   We do remove crimes that have been mapped incorrectly - which is a topic for another post, but suffice to say, when our computers locate a crime on the wrong street and we discover it - the crime is immediately corrected or removed. Over the weekend we removed three types of crimes that later did not fit our mission of notifying the public of crime events.   The first was a reported abduction in   Coeur d'Alene Idaho .  Someone reported a child getting off a bicycle, leaving the bicycle and getting into a van.  We mapped the crime immediately, but later the Coeur d'Alene police indicated it was a false alarm on their Facebook Page .   We don't often map crimes in Coeur d'Alene because police department has chosen a proprietary system that blocks the press from access.  We feel this is a great example of a police department favoring t

We get this question all of the time from SpotCrime users - what is the different between call data and police recorded ?  Here's a brief explanation of the two. 911 Call Data Departments across the country have different names for 911 call data.  It can range from ‘911 call data’ to ‘calls for service’ to ‘CAD data’ and many more. 911 call data includes any data pulled from a department’s CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system. Typical CAD companies used by departments include Intergraph , Spillman , SunGard , Tiburon , USA-Software , and New World Systems . 911 call data includes any call into a police department that requires action by an officer. It is the raw, immediate data that represents the first record of an incident.  Many police departments - like Dallas , Tulsa , Columbus , San Antonio, Hillsborough County , and Tampa (to name a few) - have started to release their CAD data in an open feed format available to the public. A benefit of 911 call data is that it is