SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

AI nonemergency call takers, White House report on improving trust and accountability in policing, doorbell footage compliance, gunfire leading cause of death for TN youth, growing up with gun violence, quitting crime, gunshot detection, cameras spark privacy debate, body cam video transparency, access to search warrants, incomplete crime data, economic benefits from criminal justice reforms, jail based mental health interventions, and more... POLICE CONDUCT Dallas Crime Data Still Dark as Year Nears Halfway Point  (Dallas Express) Are you required to comply when police request doorbell footage? 5 On Your Side investigates  (WRAL) A.I. Call Taker Will Begin Taking Over Police Nonemergency Phone Lines Next Week Artificial intelligence is “kind of a scary word for us,” admits the dispatch director.  (Williamette Week) White House report on improving trust and accountability in policing  (SpotCrime Blog) CRIME RATE How to get people to quit crime  (SlowBoring) Stud...

SpotCrime - an independent crime mapping and crime alert service - is re-introducing SpotCrime Catapult, a free software solution that allows police departments worldwide to make their crime data public. Catapult was created by SpotCrime developers and enables any police department to export public crime data from their records management or computer aided dispatch systems.  In addition to the free software, SpotCrime is also offering any police department that implements Catapult and makes their crime data available to the public, up to $4,000 in reimbursement to defray costs of implementation.  Alternatively, SpotCrime is also willing to itself pay up to $4,000 to provide the technical services to help pull a public crime data file from any police agency's system. (Detailed terms and conditions set forth here http://bit.ly/131j4xg ). “With open data initiatives rolling out everywhere, SpotCrime wants to make it easy for police departments to release their crim...

SpotCrime is mapping crime data from hundreds of police agencies which means large-scale consumption in many different formats. PDF (portable format document) is an antiquated file format still being used by agencies nationwide.  PDF’s came about in the early 1990's with the introduction of the World Wide Web and gave the ability see full documents sent via e-mail. No matter what operating system being used, the document is digitally accessible and looks uniform to all viewers. In the '90's it was favorable technology.  However, in today's standards, public data and information locked behind a PDF is disastrous. Go behind the scenes of any company that maintains a database and find that data needs to be uploaded to the database in a machine readable format. Digitally accessible documents, like PDFs, are not machine readable. According to Data.gov , ‘a digitally accessible document may be online, making it easier for a human to access it via a computer,...