SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Social media monitoring, Women in Public Safety, 2016 FBI crime stats, and more... POLICE CONDUCT In Phoenix, Women Are Breaking Public Safety's Glass Ceiling (GovTech) Alabama police agency uses social media monitoring service (Anniston Star) Local Panama City police departments feeling strained long after recession (JHG.com) ‘He shot her down’: Two officers dead in Orlando manhunt for murder suspect (WaPo) CRIME RATE Fort Lauderdale shooting suspect faces possible death penalty (CNN) Preliminary Crime Stats for 2016 Released. Report Covers January through June (FBI.gov) Violent Crime Reports Up 5.3% in First Half of 2016 (TheCrimeReport.org) Spike in assaults, especially in middle schools, dominates SPS crime report (News-Leader) Dylan Roof Sentenced To Death For Charleston Church Shooting  (CBS) POLICE TRANSPARENCY California Bill Seeks Police Surveillance Transparency (CATO Institute) New police training addresses use-of-force, tra...

There are many problems plaguing police community relations right now. Running SpotCrime, it is something I think about often in terms of improving trust between the public and the police so that we all focus on the target of reducing crime instead of pointing fingers at each other. We identify this as improving the trust quotient between law enforcement and the community. I often want to draw inferences about transparency and the quality of policing. Truthfully, we have not explored the data in terms of finding anything statistical about this. Most of our experience is anecdotal. Intuitively, I think we can all agree that if a police department is making a sincere effort to be transparent with the public they are moving in the right direction.  We’ve seen crime data transparency within police agencies develop in a couple of different ways throughout the years. There are some agencies who still do not make an effort to be open and transparent with crime data, but typical...

Updates have been made to the SpotCrime ‘Live’ Crime Data Transparency Ranking list. Only 1 city was upgraded to a 2 ranking - Baltimore. They added a calls for service and arrest data feeds after the Freddie Grey protests. 5 cities were downgraded. The recurring reason for the decrease in transparency across the country? Police system ‘upgrades’. The new year has brought dozens of RMS/CAD/database upgrades to police departments nationwide. It’s great to see agencies embracing new technology, however, these new upgrades are knocking public access to crime information offline. Boston, MA - 2 to a 0  BPD is no longer updating the open data feed due to RMS upgrade . No timeline has been given as to when the feed will be available again. Phoenix, AZ - 2 to a 1   The Phoenix  RMS upgrade knocked a weekly public file offline and dramatically decreased the the timeliness and quality of the data. St. Louis County, MO - 2 to a 0   St....

Pinal County on SpotCrime.info SpotCrime is now mapping Pinal County, AZ ! Pinal County is included in the Phoenix - Mesa - Scottsdale metro statistical area and has a population of about 375k. It has Phoenix to the north and Tucson to the south. The Phoenix and Tucson suburban areas have grown into the northern and southern parts of the county, causing it to become the second fastest growing county in the US between 2000 and 2010. The county seat is Florence (pop. 25.5k) , however the most populated city in the county is San Tan Valley (81k). . It also holds Maricopa (45.5k), Casa Grande (48.5k), Apache Junction (pop. 35.8k and partially in Maricopa County), Coolidge (11.8k), and Eloy (16.6k) as well as many census designated and unincorporated areas. San Tan Valley on SpotCrime.info Interested in crime in your Pinal County area? Check out SpotCrime.com or SpotCrime.info ! Stay aware, stay safe.

We’ve updated our Crime Data Transparency Ranking table. Check out the new table below and make sure to check out our previous blog for information on how we rank each city. We’re keeping a live table available to view any time we make updates  here . Static list of SpotCrime Crime Data Transparency rankings. View a live list here . Way to go Boston and New York City! These are the two cities we happily upgraded. Boston now posts their crime data on their open data site - they’ve been upgraded from a 1 to a 2. NYC is now publishing the NYPD Crime Map. They went from giving out almost no information to giving out monthly data. Since the data is monthly and there’s no true download option for all of the data, we’ve only upgraded them to a 1 (previously a 0). Colorado Springs doesn’t have an all-inclusive feed, but they are producing a crime blotter. We’ve moved them from a 0 to a 1. We’ve added New Orleans (NOLA) to our list. They’ve started posting data on t...