SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

In this post, I’d like to talk about the limitations of public crime maps and quasi-public-proprietary crime maps.   Don’t get me wrong, we at SpotCrime are fans of crime maps .  They are an effective tool to represent crime data and get information to the public.  But, crime maps are just one of many options of delivering useful crime data to the public. Maps in general will always have some type of dimensional limitations.  No matter how you adjust the parameters of time and distance with data on a map, it will still be just an incremental snapshot of the data set.   With crime data, if you take a too small snapshot and an area can appear to have no crime.  Take a too large of a snapshot and amount of crime data could crowd the map, show too much crime, and render the map unreadable.  Heat maps are sometimes employed to show density of data on a map, but these too have their own adjustable variances that can influence what is being projected.    Ultimately, the same limitations of a

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

It t ook the tragic event of   Jeanne Clery   rape and murder to initiate the creation of the  Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act  (20 USC § 1092(f)).   Now any college or university receiving federal funds is required to disclose information about crimes on or near their campuses.  So if you attend a University that receives federal aid, you should have access to crime information.  But what about everyone else?  Why shouldn't cities and counties have the same requirements to inform their citizens? Part of the inspiration of this post was a recent story in the   Houston Chronical   about a woman who successfully sued her   apartment complex   because her apartment company failed to notify her about a recent break-in at the apartment next to her.  Shortly after renewing her lease, she was attacked in her apartment and brutally raped for 10 hours in February of 2009.    In this particular case, the apartment complex was at fault part

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 vendor that puts restr

You can find a police department in pretty much every city in the US, no matter how large or small.  Each of those departments work 24/7 to keep their residents safe.  That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through thick and thin, rain, shine, sleet, snow, ice...you get the idea. Departments are working every day to create tools and programs that will help keep their communities safe.  However, for some smaller cities and departments, this may be a hard task to undertake.  They may not have the technology or capital required to create and innovate in order to keep communities informed and safe...or so they thought.  Enter SpotCrime. SpotCrime is offering access to the Chiefs or Sheriffs of many smaller departments to map their own crime on the SpotCrime website!  Instead of paying for the technology to generate reports, the department can map the information themselves -- for free!  The population of most towns who are granted this access is normally under 10,000.  With access,