SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Body cam implementation and video release times move toward faster transparency, studying the mental health of police officers and first responders, effects of a smaller police budget, police misconduct multi-city comparison, gun safety, pandemic crime, police partnerships with predictive policing companies, crime prediction software, and more... POLICE CONDUCT Iowa City to consider police liaison job to go on mental health calls  (The Gazette) Jersey City’s Quality of Life Task Force Introduces New Office, Promotes Resident Response Center in 2021  (TAPinto.net) Fewer Police, No Parades: The Squeeze on Local Budgets  (Governing) Proposed Virginia bill would require police to release body cam footage within 15 days  (WRIC) see also:  Bill would require every Illinois cop to wear body cameras by 2025 — but will departments comply?  (Journal Star) Stress response of police officers during COVID‐19: A moderated mediation model  (Wiley Online Library) see ...

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castille. The list goes on . All were victims of failed policing - use of force, implicit bias, ineffective policing, and bad community relationships. Good policing relationships are based on trust . To obtain trust, transparency is needed to cultivate healthy police-community relationships fostering an effective and open accountability feedback loop between the police and the communities they serve.  Crime datasets are a good place to start when building trust. Think of crime data transparency or open crime data as the basis for a grassroots (and free) neighborhood oversight board. This level transparency telegraphs a modern, progressive, and accountable police department that is focused on facing the data to improve operations.  Asking for open crime data means requiring police agencies to release more than just annual FBI UCR/NIBRS data . It means demanding timely, robust, and raw datasets that are available for anyone to access, do...

SpotCrime is mapping crime data from hundreds of police agencies which means large-scale consumption in many different formats. PDF (portable format document) is an antiquated file format still being used by agencies nationwide.  PDF’s came about in the early 1990's with the introduction of the World Wide Web and gave the ability see full documents sent via e-mail. No matter what operating system being used, the document is digitally accessible and looks uniform to all viewers. In the '90's it was favorable technology.  However, in today's standards, public data and information locked behind a PDF is disastrous. Go behind the scenes of any company that maintains a database and find that data needs to be uploaded to the database in a machine readable format. Digitally accessible documents, like PDFs, are not machine readable. According to Data.gov , ‘a digitally accessible document may be online, making it easier for a human to access it via a computer,...

When SpotCrime launched in 2007, we were one of the only companies to offer free crime mapping to every agency in US. That same year, the price of crime mapping services averaged between $20,000 to $300,000 per agency. Just recently, the reportedly largest police vendor crime mapping company, CrimeReports.com, announced they are finally giving away their crime mapping for free to all police agencies. The only other large scale crime mapping vendor that still requires payment from police departments is CrimeMapping.com. If your agency is paying for public crime mapping, we recommend you ask about the free options. We think SpotCrime's competitive and innovative approach has made an impact on the cost of public crime mapping for everyone. With over 70 million alerts sent this year alone, we feel we've made an impact in actually getting crime information to the public as well. Unfortunately, vendor crime mapping companies in the market today still lock up public crime...

Dear California Subscriber, We’ve just been made aware of some recent proposals to change California Public Records Act laws that will limit accountability and transparency of local governments in California. This is a serious challenge to the California Public Records Act and could seriously affect the public's access to crime data. Here is the letter from First Amendment Coalition describing the changes: http://firstamendmentcoalition.org/threat-watch-browns-budget-cuts-slash-services-spike-costs-for-access-to-public-records/gov-brown-veto-cpra-threats-in-budget-bill/ Here is a link to the legislation: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB71&search_keywords= We encourage you to reach out to Governor Jerry Brown’s office. You can reach Governor Jerry Brown via email here: http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php or by phone at (916) 445-2841 Let him know you value government accountability and transparency in ...

Recently the Benton County Sheriff (Arkansas) announced a new public  crime map . Local news OzarksFirst.com reported that the map was paid for by a $15,000 grant. Not a large sum, and often crime mapping vendors have similar contact costs charging $150 a month for public crime mapping services. Using a simple discounted cash flow valuation of a police agency contract at $1,800 a year at a 10% discount rate, you'll get a total valuation of the vendor mapping contract at $18,000 (divide 10% into $1,800). Very similar to the amount paid by Benton. We have seen some agencies pay larger sums for public crime mapping. Most notably, Seattle Police Department spent approximately $350,000 for their public mapping system. So how do we get to $180 million in savings? Since we are using back of the envelope numbers, we are going to be very conservative in our estimated costs. We'll use an approximate cost of $10,000 per police agency for public crime mapping. ...

View the map at SpotCrime.com , SpotCrime.info , or the SpotCrime Salt Lake City Map Salt Lake City, UT  is now on  SpotCrime ! We applaud the Salt Lake Police Department for making their Calls for Service log available in an open source format. The webpage gives users the ability to view and sort the information. After 48 hours, the calls will be archived and will still be viewable at the data.slcgov.com website here The new webpage is run internally by the department, not an outside vendor. This is a great step in the right direction for government transparency with the public. The new webpage will easily allow both public and press to view, use, and share the information  without the threat of a lawsuit . Our hope is the release of this data will make more people aware - and hopefully more people will be able to do interesting and innovative things with the data. Check out the YouTube video below Chief Burbank's announcement...