SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Precision Policing Definition Precision policing is a systematic, proactive and almost precognitive approach to ensuring public safety . It organizes a police agency’s structure around data and information to build investigations of high value suspects committing the most crimes. It involves a more collaborative inter-agency cooperation, but also a strong focus on community collaboration. What was once the job of the detective department, is now a whole agency collective. It was developed by the NYPD in 2014 and championed by the recent drop in crimes across the city . With precision policing, the NYPD has moved away from the controversial stop and frisk and moved toward identifying people and patterns with data. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton describes it as "fewer arrests for minor offenses—'broken windows' types of offenses—while at the same time more significant numbers of arrests for the serious crimes that we're focusing on."  Although stop

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 typically i

The recent controversial encounters with the police and citizens in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, and now North Charleston raise the question - does the way in which a police agency makes their crime data available determine the the quality of policing?  With the exception of Ferguson PD thanks to recent DOJ review , we can’t make claims about the quality of policing for North Charleston, Cleveland, or NYPD.  However, we do have enough knowledge to assess the quality of each agency’s stance on open crime data and make some inferences on how this affects public trust.  Based on the correspondence we’ve received from police agencies over the years, we think certain agencies may be telegraphing their commitment to community policing by how they release and respond to requests for public data.  In Ferguson, SpotCrime was getting open data access for a period of years, however the data stopped two years prior to the shooting of Michael Brown . We do not have a full explanation