SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

We’re happy to announce the newest addition to the SpotCrime family - SpotSpec.com ! SpotSpec, powered by SpotCrime , takes an in-depth look at crime around specific places and generates crime rankings and reports for locations like schools, restaurants, and hotels. The ultimate goal of SpotSpec is to provide a useful tool that creates awareness with the public, highlights the importance of police data transparency, and increases community trust with police agencies. For now, we have rolled it out exclusively for Baltimore City Schools , Baltimore County schools , and Baltimore City restaurants , but hope to be able to add more areas and locations soon. Each location receives:  A calculated SpotCrime SpotSpec score A ranking against other similar locations And an individually tailored Crime Spec report We hope you find this new tool useful and interesting. Go out, explore, be aware, and be safe. Head on over to www.SpotSpec.com and let...

Updates have been made to the SpotCrime ‘Live’ Crime Data Transparency Ranking list. Only 1 city was upgraded to a 2 ranking - Baltimore. They added a calls for service and arrest data feeds after the Freddie Grey protests. 5 cities were downgraded. The recurring reason for the decrease in transparency across the country? Police system ‘upgrades’. The new year has brought dozens of RMS/CAD/database upgrades to police departments nationwide. It’s great to see agencies embracing new technology, however, these new upgrades are knocking public access to crime information offline. Boston, MA - 2 to a 0  BPD is no longer updating the open data feed due to RMS upgrade . No timeline has been given as to when the feed will be available again. Phoenix, AZ - 2 to a 1   The Phoenix  RMS upgrade knocked a weekly public file offline and dramatically decreased the the timeliness and quality of the data. St. Louis County, MO - 2 to a 0   St....

Two agencies, The Vera Institute of Justice in accordance with The Police Foundation and the NYPD in accordance with Microsoft, have recently announced their own separate development, test, and implementation of a model for law enforcement agencies aiming to upgrade current CompStat processes. Both The Vera Institute and NYPD are calling their new versions of CompStat ‘CompStat 2.0’. The Vera Institute has a history of work on public safety related issues like police management practices, police-community relations, misconduct, and policing in democratic societies worldwide. And, the Vera Institute worked with the NYPD in the past on development of projects including The Manhattan Summons project as well as the development and implementation of the original CompStat launched by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton in the early 90’s. The New CompStat 2.0 (two different versions) Unfortunately, we weren’t able to receive any information from NYPD PIO office on their version o...

For over 20 years the Department of Justice has had the ability to investigate police agencies for violating constitutional rights. The investigations begin to enforce laws like the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 , the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (“Safe Streets Act”), and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VI”). The laws are intended to address systemic issues rather than individual complaints of police agencies.  The DOJ can file civil lawsuits against local government in order for them to adopt reforms - which is typically done by consent decrees or memorandums of agreement - before anything is taken to trial. Out of the estimated 18,000 police agencies in the US, about 65 have been under some sort of investigation by the DOJ since the 90’s. The DOJ investigations included misconduct in numerous areas, but the main three areas were: Use of Force Stops, Searches and Arrests Discriminatory Policing ...

Public data belongs in the hands of the public. Not in Kalamazoo currently. Kalamazoo Police Department recently shut down their open, unrestricted crime data feed and moved to to a closed, proprietary third party crime mapping website. Open, unrestricted crime data feed Here is what an open, unrestricted public crime data feed looks like on an independently run crime map. And here is what a closed, proprietary public crime data feed looks like on an independently run crime map. Notice a difference? No, crime didn’t decrease with a new crime map. No, the police department didn’t stop responding to calls. The difference is data is no longer openly available in Kalamazoo for the public and press to collect use, and share. Instead, if you want to see what crime is happening in Kalamazoo, the only way to do so is to head to the new crime mapping website that places restrictions on how the public and press can use the public crime data that appears on the...

Earlier this month, the Petersburg Virginia Police put out an announcement that they were allowing the public to view crime data on a paid vendor's website. This is a huge step forward for the city because access to data like this has never been available before. The plus is now Petersburg citizens and the press can look at the crime data. The minus is the city supported vendor restricts sharing and publication of the information. The classic “you can look at the information, but don’t share it, independently tabulate it, or report on the data” because that would violate the vendor’s business interests. As a result, crimes can’t be shared on social media and the press can’t use the information for reporting.  SpotCrime has been asking for an open data feed for this kind of data for at least five years . Each time, we’ve been told that the technology was not available to make the data public. Nearby agencies, however, have been doing this for years. Meanwhile, the Pet...

SpotCrime  continues to be the only major crime mapping company to break out shootings into it’s own icon. Often it is very difficult to identify that a shooting has happened from the crime data we receive. A lot of the time, we are left to using the description associated with an incident (given there is a description provided) to determine if a shooting occurred.  Most crime mapping sites will map a shooting with some sort of assault icon. This causes shootings to get lost - filed under the same icon as fist fights, knife attacks, kidnappings, and verbal assaults. We believe this does not give a full picture of crime in the area. We rely on open crime incident data sets, RMS data, CAD data, UCR data and/or a mix of the bunch. It just depends on what agencies make available. Not all agencies make the same data available. The inconsistency in datasets from agency to agency and jurisdiction to jurisdiction has also made this task incredibly difficult. Thi...