SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

SpotCrime just sent over 1 million crime alerts this week. A new record for us. That's over 140,000 alerts a day. We'd like to thank our subscribers and our supporters for helping us reach this number. By maintaining our integrity through our financial independence, SpotCrime strives to be the best at delivering timely information to the public through any and all available channels. We'd like to thank every police department that shares data with us and/or makes the data fully public without restrictions or without proprietary systems. Crime mapping is a useful tool to show crime information, but it pales in comparison to full transparency allowing the public and the press to consume, share, and publish crime data without the threat of a lawsuit. We at SpotCrime are proud of not charging any police department for our service, not billing the public for access and not taking any state or federal funds. And yet, in five short years we've become the most visited...

At SpotCrime, we often request data from police departments that have purchased crime mapping systems.  Ostensibly, these crime maps displayed on the Internet are intended to distribute crime information to the public, but at this current time, almost every vendor that is contracted to map crime puts restrictions on access.  When we inform the police department that there are restrictions on access, about 50% of the time we find out that the department was not aware their vendor had restrictions preventing the press from republishing data.  A good majority of the time, we are able to access the data directly from the records system. The other 50% of departments abdicate responsibility to the vendor as if they are not responsible for the vendor they have contracted with to deliver public information.  Forgive the pun, but this is a cop out.  If you are contracting with a company to deliver public information to the public, shouldn't you be responsible for the ve...

SpotCrime always maps for free - meaning we don’t charge the police agency (we have no interest in selling any services to your police agency) and we do not charge the public.  We have a news model and, like any news organization, use advertising.  Our diabolical world domination goal is to get relevant, useful, timely crime information to everyone on the planet.   But, not everyone likes our approach to mapping.  We do have a simpler version of our crime map, MyLocalCrime.com , but that still may not be the best solution for everyone.  The best thing about the available technology in mapping is that it’s relatively inexpensive to map crime and there are many companies providing crime maps.  The problem is that not all departments make public crime data fully and easily accessible to the public. We’ve noticed that when a city or county makes their data available freely to everyone, without restrictions and in a table format  -- similar to DC , San...

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about who owns public crime data .  SpotCrime was even pursued after another company in Federal court over the issue .  There are many entities that are staking claim and proprietary ownership over crime data. Here at SpotCrime, we believe that if ownership is to be claimed then crime data belongs to the individual who produces the crime. Credit should be given where credit is due -- and we believe the originator of the crime should be able to claim copyright over the crimes they have committed.   SpotCrime will compensate a criminal when a crime report is created and used on our website.  SpotCrime will give a penny ($.01) for every crime report created by an individual. To be properly compensated, please follow the directions below: Head to your local police department Report to an officer each crime you have committed.  If you think a crime can qualify as ...