Location information is imperative for effective and informative policing
Typically, when a police agencies releases CAD or RMS data, they release block level address locations. SpotCrime will ask police agencies for latitude and longitude coordinates, block level addresses, and even exact addresses. Lat/long coordinates are a part of our SpotCrime Open Crime Data Standard (SOCS). This level of location information helps plot a crime as accurately as possible on a map. Recently, we’ve noticed two trends that are disconcerting to the public - reporting crime by intersections, and Marsy's law (or any related law) that bans the release of crime locations all together. Intersection reporting First, the San Francisco Police Department has decided to publish crime locations by the intersections citing privacy concerns. We reached out to San Francisco PD and their reasoning was ‘...to ensure privacy all parties involved, minimize re-identification risk, and still provide as much useful, informative data as possible, the departm...
