SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Fusion centers, Chicago consent-decree, inflation and crime, guns leading cause of death among children and teens, crime reduction and prevention plans, firearm violence, body cams, data brokers access to public data, campus crime transparency, mass incarceration, resentencing in TN, abuse in DJJ facility, and more... POLICE CONDUCT Latest consent-decree report hits Chicago police leadership in key areas: Community policing and building community trust  (Chicago Tribune) Tips for reaching 911 during cell phone outages  (ABC10) 13 Nassar victims file $130 million in claims against FBI for 'gross negligence'  (The Detroit News) FBI Partnering with Fusion Centers to Tackle Threats  (FBI.gov) Baltimore aims to be one of the first cities to address police staffing shortages by hiring civilian investigators  (KOMU) CRIME RATE As inflation keeps rising, more small-time thefts count as felonies  (AXIOS) see also:  Inflation in US could lead to rise in crime  (WPSD) The changing epidemi

When talking about crime data, is there a distinction between open, public, and proprietary crime data. Absolutely. What is open data? Open data is data that’s available in a machine readable format without restrictions on the ability to use, consume, or share the information. Philadelphia and Chicago are good examples of cities that have open crime data available for residents, the press, and anyone to collect, use, and redistribute. Philadelphia SpotCrime Map Open crime data is the best option for police agencies. The easier the information is to obtain, the easier it is to get more eyes on the information which, we believe, leads to really cool ways to view the data and, most importantly, leads to safer and more informed neighborhoods. What is public data? Public data is data that’s available to the public to collect or look at, but it’s not easily redistributed (or machine readable) and sometimes not easily obtained. It might require an open record

SpotCrime has been trying to collect crime data from Jersey City , population 247k, since we first started mapping crime nationwide. We found Jersey City calls for service on the Jersey City open data portal last week and immediately loaded the information to SpotCrime. Check it out here. When we checked today for more data, we found the open data link no longer displays the feed. Perhaps Jersey City saw the positive feedback from the NYPD Crime map and decided to post crime data. We're hoping decision's like NYPD's to release crime data (even though we weren't completely satisfied with their map) help encourage other cities to release crime data. Or maybe it was a move by the new mayor, police chief, and pubic safety director. In a lot of cities, the Mayor sometimes has a role in decisions made by the Chief of Police, including wether or not they stay around. Former Chief Tom Comey retired shortly after Former Mayor Jerrimiah Healy lost the mayoral race

When SpotCrime launched in 2007, we were one of the only companies to offer free crime mapping to every agency in US. That same year, the price of crime mapping services averaged between $20,000 to $300,000 per agency. Just recently, the reportedly largest police vendor crime mapping company, CrimeReports.com, announced they are finally giving away their crime mapping for free to all police agencies. The only other large scale crime mapping vendor that still requires payment from police departments is CrimeMapping.com. If your agency is paying for public crime mapping, we recommend you ask about the free options. We think SpotCrime's competitive and innovative approach has made an impact on the cost of public crime mapping for everyone. With over 70 million alerts sent this year alone, we feel we've made an impact in actually getting crime information to the public as well. Unfortunately, vendor crime mapping companies in the market today still lock up public crime