Miscellaneous

Keeping Up With Crime

By PI Magazine (Tamara Thompson and Rosemarie Mesis)

Surprisingly, I wrote about crime mapping only once in 2008. That was about the efforts to track and map crime incidents at universities and included some tips for finding online crime map sites. CrimeReports, which I wrote about in 2007, is still chugging along, now with about 150 participating police departments just in California, where they have the most extensive representation.

Fewer agencies have data at CrimeMapping. Some of these agencies also display crime incidents on a map at their law enforcement site, which may be in a different format. An older program called CrimeViewCommunity has a site with a URL that points to CrimeMapping.com. But you may find a few additional law enforcement agencies using CrimeViewCommunity at their site whose crime incidents aren’t included in other crime mapping programs. For example, the Detroit Police Department uses CrimeViewCommunity but the map is hosted only at their site. Use the inurl modifier to find agencies with crime maps. You’ll notice that there is only a 30-90 day retention of incidents.

Full post as published by PI buzz on March 10, 2009 (boomark / email).