SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

SpotCrime, the most comprehensive online source for crime data, announced today that it will make its crime mapping service available to every police department in the U.S. free of charge. The decision by SpotCrime to map crime data for any police department that requests it “will help to meet the public’s increasing demand for accurate, up-to-date crime data, allowing departments to devote more of their budgets to putting police on the street,” according to SpotCrime Founder and President Colin Drane. Drane decided to offer crime mapping services to police departments nationwide after learning that some of his competitors were charging police agencies for exclusive mapping services, then reselling that crime data for commercial purposes. “Knowing how much people need that crime data, we wanted to make our crime mapping services available without locking police departments into restrictive contracts with a single vendor,” explains Drane, whose company has become the nation’s mo...

SpotCrime always maps for free - meaning we don’t charge the police agency (we have no interest in selling any services to your police agency) and we do not charge the public.  We have a news model and, like any news organization, use advertising.  Our diabolical world domination goal is to get relevant, useful, timely crime information to everyone on the planet.   But, not everyone likes our approach to mapping.  We do have a simpler version of our crime map, MyLocalCrime.com , but that still may not be the best solution for everyone.  The best thing about the available technology in mapping is that it’s relatively inexpensive to map crime and there are many companies providing crime maps.  The problem is that not all departments make public crime data fully and easily accessible to the public. We’ve noticed that when a city or county makes their data available freely to everyone, without restrictions and in a table format  -- similar to DC , San...