SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

It’s that time of year again. Most students will be back in class by the end of this month. Have you checked out the crime around your school? We took a look at crime around the top public schools in Baltimore City .  BPI/Western Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and Western High School  Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and Western High School are two different schools that share a campus.  Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, also referred to as BPI, Poly, or The Institute, offers a STEM curriculum. Western High School is the oldest public all-girls high school remaining in the US. Current Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake graduated from Western in 1988. The schools are located off of the Jones Falls Expressway and near multiple parks, the Baltimore City Zoo, and many private high schools including Roland Park, Gilman, Friends, and two Universities - Loyola and Notre Dame of Maryland. Check out the screenshot of recent crime near BPI and Western High School

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

Yesterday in the USA Today, UCrime was mentioned in Kim Komando's column about specialized maps. She wrote, "UCrime shows crimes on college campuses. Select a university with the dropdown box. You'll see reported crimes plotted on a map. Click on categories to see different types of offenses. Learn more about them by clicking on a crime." To see this article on USA Today's website. go to: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/2008-09-18-specialized-maps_N.htm . UCrime also received a mention in the Daily Targum, Rutger's school newspaper. To see this article, go to: http://media.www.dailytargum.com/media/storage/paper168/news/2008/09/19/PageOne/Web-Site.Highlights.Crime.On.Campus-3440490.shtml . There was also a story about UCrime in the Daily Illini, the newspaper for University of Illinois- Urbana Champaign. Link to view story: http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2008/09/19/News/Web-Site.Maps.Crimes.On.Campus-3440457.shtm

Spotcrime's sister company,UCrime, received three mentions in college newspapers this week. The Independent Voice of Central Michigan interviewed a professor at the school that said "parents might find the Web site useful because it shows what the crime is like at the featured universities." To see the full article, go to: http://media.www.cm-life.com/media/storage/paper906/news/2008/09/15/News/Web-Site.Maps.Reported.City.Campus.Crimes-3430485.shtml . The Daily 49er, the newspaper of Cal State Long Beach, wrote an article about UCrime. To see it, go to: http://www.daily49er.com/news/ucrime_supplies_visuals_to_campus-area_crime_statistics . Duke University's newspaper, The Chronicle, also did an article about UCrime now providing mapping for their university. To see this article, go to: http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2008/09/12/News/Ucrime.Provides.Stats.Tracking.For.Area.Crime-3428746.shtml . To see the UCrime website, go to: http://www