A Relationship Between Transparency and Dangerous Cities
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