Why Do We Map Crime?
The original title of this blog post was- If A Crime is Mapped and No One Sees It- What's the Point? Roughly four years ago, I started SpotCrime in Baltimore as a hobby. Baltimore is a particularly violent city, and as a transplant from Philadelphia, I wanted to know where the shootings were happening that I was hearing about everyday. I also was personally enamored by the idea of crowd sourcing and envisioned the public interacting with crime data and helping law enforcement reduce crime. To answer the question - Why do We Map Crime? SpotCrime maps crime to identify it's approximate location and deliver that information to anyone interested in crime information for the general area. Put simply, we map crime so we can deliver relevant information to those interested in being informed about crime. Today we send out over 100,000 crime alert emails a day and by next month will have 300,000 subscribers. We are still amateurs in the crime mapping space defined in terms