SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

Federal law enforcement requires body cameras causing local Sheriff's offices to pull deputies, police union contracts, access to public police scanners ends in Honolulu, data transparency failures of the Clery Act, ghost guns a problem in Philly, Dallas crime reduction plan working, racial profiling report compliance in Texas, and more... POLICE CONDUCT Minneapolis illegally withholding hundreds of police misconduct files, says lawsuit from public records advocates  (The Star Tribune) KXAN investigation leads to first-ever 100% racial profiling report compliance in Texas  (KXAN) Beaufort cop invited kids to lunch. Then he showed them family’s criminal records  (The Island Packet) Asheville police release list of calls officers will no longer respond to. Move comes in response to dozens of officers leaving police force in past year, officials say  (Wyff4) U.S. Mandates Body Cameras for Federal Law-Enforcement Officers  (Wall Street Journal) see also:  HCSO,...

SpotCrime has been asked to submit testimony on an upcoming Kansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) hearing that will be discussing changes to the current FOIA laws, bringing transparency in Kansas into the 21st century. You can read the testimony we submitted below. This is not our first time providing testimony on access to public information. In 2014, we were asked to provide oral and written testimony on the Maryland Open Data Bill (SB644) . The data SpotCrime collects is public information, so if a police agency is not already openly releasing the data publicly to their website or they don't have some sort of public blotter, we are sometimes directed to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the information. This has allowed SpotCrime to provide an invaluable case study on how transparency and public access laws are being applied at the the local level. We've found that after we submit the same request to local jurisdictions, each police agency ha...

UPDATE: We are now getting crime data from Irving, TX! SpotCrime is required to FOIA this information each time we want updates. The Irving PD is giving this information for free (via an automatically updated feed) to a private vendor that restricts how the public and press can use the information, but they do not require the vendor to send a FOIA request each time they'd like to update the data on their website. Ultimately, we would like to see this data published to an open data portal. We are not sure when or if this will be accomplished. We'd like to note that we've paid for programming for the city to pull this data and to set up automatic updates, similar to how the department is automatically updating their third party private vendor, however, Chief Spivey and the city have elected not to set up automatic updates. Instead, they are making a city employee manually pull and send the data each time it is requested. We believe this to be an intentional waste of time a...

Here above is a crime map of all shootings that took place from January 2008 to May 2009. Each point represents one shooting. When a color gradient is applied to these points, we get the map above which depicts these shooting areas. N. Generous