Why Public Crime Maps Stink
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