SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Our  police   departments  work hard to keep you safe - especially during the holidays, natural disasters, and even through tough economic times resulting in cuts in resources within the  police  force. Contact  your  local PD - give them a BIG  Thank  You for doing what they do (even if you recently got a ticket for doing 5 over in a school zone...and  your  right headlight was out...and you forgot to put  your  updated registration in  your  glove box because  your  husband forgot to give it to you...) They work hard and are willing to risk their life to keep our neighborhoods safe . If the area  your   police   department  patrols is mapped on SpotCrime , make sure to also give a BIG  Thank  You for making crime data available for the public to use. Public data belongs in the hands of the public. If data is mapped on SpotCrime, it is likely  your   police   department  is making the data easy to access for the public. (We like the word public - can you tell?) If the area  yo

We rarely remove crimes from SpotCrime .  Our general premise is that once they are made public, they should be public for everyone.   We do remove crimes that have been mapped incorrectly - which is a topic for another post, but suffice to say, when our computers locate a crime on the wrong street and we discover it - the crime is immediately corrected or removed. Over the weekend we removed three types of crimes that later did not fit our mission of notifying the public of crime events.   The first was a reported abduction in   Coeur d'Alene Idaho .  Someone reported a child getting off a bicycle, leaving the bicycle and getting into a van.  We mapped the crime immediately, but later the Coeur d'Alene police indicated it was a false alarm on their Facebook Page .   We don't often map crimes in Coeur d'Alene because police department has chosen a proprietary system that blocks the press from access.  We feel this is a great example of a police department favoring t