SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Thanks for helping us reach 1 million subscribers! It only took us eight years! But, 1 million subscribers, 200 million crime alerts annually, and over 40 million people interacting with SpotCrime data monthly continues to make us the largest crime alerting system in the US and the most visited crime mapping website in the world!  We attribute our growth to the fact that we are the only independent, open crime data company that is self-supporting - we have not taken any outside funding and have never charged police departments for the information we provide.  Our sole intent is to make all relevant crime information available to the public, taking full advantage of the Internet to allow this data to be shared and ultimately driving both greater awareness and new measures that will lead to a reduction in crime. The open crime data we distribute for free to users across the world creates a level of transparency with citizens and public officials that increases both...

The low hanging fruit for police agencies in the open data movement is opening up incident based RMS/CAD data. Typically RMS/CAD data is available, it’s just not in an open, machine readable format yet.  Here are 5 great reasons to make your police incident data open - meaning it’s made available in a machine readable format for anyone to collect, use, and share. 5) Proactively answer FOIAs By being proactive and making data available in an open format, it will create a one-stop shop for FOIA requests - lessening the time, money, and resources it takes to respond to hundreds of FOIA requests for the same information. 4) Apps!  And not to mention FREE apps! Making the data openly available creates more opportunities for entrepreneurs to do something useful with the information. Something a police agency may not have the time or resources to commit their time to or afford. Check out the free SpotCrime apps for iPhone , Android , and Kindle Fire . 3) Th...

A ‘release to one, release to all’ federal initiative pilot program will be rolled out in the next 6 months by a handful of federal agencies. Under the initiative any member of the public will presumably have access to the result of almost any FOIA request to the participating agencies. A few journalists have expressed concern over the idea , some in fear investigative stories will be harder to write, others concerned that the public will now have access to a every single FOIA they file. Some journalists suggested a small head start for the original FOIA requester would be fair. This line of thinking doesn’t resonate well with the premise of open data. Especially open crime data. However, this thinking is similar to what is happening with crime data and crime mapping vendors. Crime mapping vendors across the country are regularly granted access to a more up-to-date crime data feed than the public. In Durham, NC the vendor gets a more up-to-date feed than the Du...

The crime mapping space in the business world is a small space. But for those who do seek out crime information, more people go to SpotCrime than anywhere else. Here is where we are by the numbers: Emails We are projected to send out over 125 million emails this year alone. That’s 125,000,000 alerts that are individually tailored to each user and delivered directly into their personal mailbox.  Apps We are the only company to have a crime map for the Kindle Fire in addition to Android and iPhone . SpotCrime.info is mobile friendly and works great on any browser. Web traffic (from Similarweb.com ) SpotCrime trumps in web traffic. We are almost twice the size of all other major crime mapping websites combined in December! Socially we’ve looked at the game a little differently than other crime mapping sites. Instead of posting about our own successes and daily happenings, we push out as much crime information to social platforms used by millions of peopl...

Every police agency has options on how to bring crime information to the public. For example,  the AMBER Alert tool is almost universally used. The idea is that if a child is taken an alert is sent to anyone and everyone so the quicker the information gets to the public the better of saving the child and reducing harm to the child. (EDIT: A couple of days after we published this post, Facebook announced their AMBER Alert program !) Not all crime events can have the same urgency as an AMBER alert - there's a huge difference between the robbery around the corner and an AMBER alert - but why should your access to these two pieces of information be different. All crime information can have the same level of openness - meaning the ability of the press and the public to use, share, and distribute the information is equal. Police agencies have varying degrees of sharing crime data. We've summed them up into four: 1. Agencies don't share much at a...

We came across an infographic by the Sunlight Foundation  listing top datasets that drive engagement when published to a city’s open data portal. Most popular open datasets Notice anything? Crime related data is listed not once, but twice! So, why aren’t more cities publishing crime data openly?  We’re not sure. However, whenever we reach out to a police agency to collect data to map on SpotCrime and send out in our free crime alerts , we make sure to ask for open crime data and explain what ‘open’ means. Check out the definition of open data here .  More importantly, we do not demand exclusivity for the data. Some crime mapping vendors do this. Socrata , an open data vendor to cities across the nation, notes - “In addition to eliminating technological and usability barriers, it is important to remove legal barriers, such as distribution and copyright restrictions." All of the crime mapping vendors we're aware of have a terms of use on thei...

We find it unfair sometimes to compare cities using the FBI UCR reports because some agencies report on crimes differently . However, LawStreetMedia ranked the top 10 most dangerous cities under 200,000 in population and we thought it would be interesting to see if the cities with higher crime rates were open with their crime data. The FBI reports for 2013 have been released only for January-June 2013, so those are the percentages being used. And the rankings are based on the 2012 FBI crime rate per 100,000 people. In the article, LawStreetMedia noted a few of the agencies were strapped tight with their budget. Which surprises us because a few of those agencies are paying for crime mapping by contracting with proprietary systems like Omega. If all of these police agencies would release the information openly , crime mapping companies including SpotCrime would map the information for free. Out of the list below, only one agency is releasing crime information that can be used an...

SpotCrime has graded 50 US cities on how transparent they are with crime data. A 2 grade is an ‘A+, you are awesome!’ - the city is open with their crime data, meaning it follows this criteria: Fair and equal access to the data; there are no restrictions on use or sharing of the information It’s free; no registrations, licenses, fees, etc are associated with the information It’s available in machine readable format or a format capable of automating Information is timely and up to date A 1 grade is an ‘OK, but you can do better’ - the city may publish some sort of crime data feed, but it’s: Incomplete (missing part of a location, missing time, etc) Out of date (In some cases up to date information is only given to a preferred vendor and everyone else has to wait up to a week to receive similar information) The information is in a really hard to read format (.pdf, fax, snail mail, word doc) A 0 grade is a ‘See me after class and you may get detention for a semester’. Th...

Holy cow look at all of those crimes on the map!! That is what you'd first think looking at a crime map in a city like Baltimore . But, if you really think about it and think past all of the thefts, shootings, assaults, you start to think about how those icons got there. Think about the work and people involved to get a dot on a map. It starts with 911. A concerned resident (like you) sees something suspicious or a crime and calls 911.  Then, the 911 Dispatcher collects as much information as possible about the incident. They then decide where, how, and how many officers to dispatch to a certain location. This dispatching process takes equipment and technology. Phones, database systems, cars, radio, uniforms, badges, guns, and training. Then comes the actual officer. Well trained officers are needed to respond to each and every dot on the SpotCrime map . We have a database of well over 15 million crimes . That's A LOT of work for police officers! Once the off...

Thanks to feedback, we've been able to add two new cities to SpotCrime -  Fairfield, CA and Bellaire, TX ! Fairfield has a population of approximately 108k and we reached out to the department due to an email from a concerned user who wanted to be able to track crime in her neighborhood. Here is the email from her - ' I live in a neighborhood that has been seeing an extensive number of home burgluries [sic] /robberies as well as vandalism. We have had at least six burglaries in the last two weeks and none of them are showing up on your map. Why is that?' We had been mapping areas around her city, but had not yet started to map Fairfield.  We reached out to the PD and within a couple of days established a feed! Pretty simple!   In Bellaire, TX, we  received  another email, but this time it was from an officer at the police department.  The officer wanted to post crime to SpotCrime to help better inform residents of crime in his town. ...

SpotCrime just sent over 1 million crime alerts this week. A new record for us. That's over 140,000 alerts a day. We'd like to thank our subscribers and our supporters for helping us reach this number. By maintaining our integrity through our financial independence, SpotCrime strives to be the best at delivering timely information to the public through any and all available channels. We'd like to thank every police department that shares data with us and/or makes the data fully public without restrictions or without proprietary systems. Crime mapping is a useful tool to show crime information, but it pales in comparison to full transparency allowing the public and the press to consume, share, and publish crime data without the threat of a lawsuit. We at SpotCrime are proud of not charging any police department for our service, not billing the public for access and not taking any state or federal funds. And yet, in five short years we've become the most visited...

With today's Facebook IPO , we thought we'd take a look at how crime maps are 'liked' on the social media giant. If you look at the pie chart below of the main crime maps on the Internet right now, you can see that SpotCrime is in the lead.  Thank you for the 'likes'! SpotCrime includes our sites SpotCrime.com Facebook page and MyLocalCrime.com Facebook page 'likes'.  Check out both pages and (if you haven't already) give them a 'like' by heading here for SpotCrime and here for MyLocalCrime .  We also share lots of breaking and interesting news articles through both of our pages as well as updates about our site.  We think 'likes' show the popularity of our maps and wanted to say Thank You again for the support!

There are two main categories of crime mapping  (or two ends of the scale) 1. Institutional crime mapping - designed for professional analysts with many bells a whistles 2. Public facing crime mapping - designed to get information to public fast. We at SpotCrime tend to the public facing end of the spectrum.   We provide very little analytics - although our city pages do have a basic charts page - http://spotcrime.com/analytics/md/baltimore What we do focus on is distribution and engagement . Our distribution in the US is larger than any other crime mapping site on the Internet.  We have multiple websites for the public to choose from that are all fast and functional - SpotCrime.com , SpotCrime.info , MyLocalCrime.com , and UCrime.com .  With the thought that people register information differently, we’ve created multiple outlets for residents to choose from.   SpotCrime.info , the newest SpotCrime addition We also provide our maps in more ...