Legal Research

For You and Your Clients - "I'm In Your Google, Looking for Crimes"

Posted by Tara Calishain: "The Mountain View (CA) Police Department and CrimeReports recently teamed up to show Mountain View crimes on CrimeReports maps. The maps appear to be Google Maps.

Speaking of Google, I put in the main address for Google to see if all was peaceful and... oh noes! A B&E last Wednesday on the 1600 block of Ampitheatre Parkway! (CrimeReports does not give exact addresses for crimes to protect victim privacy.) Whether this occurred at Google or not, I hope everything is all right. And I hope that "Disposition: ARR" means they managed to arrest whoever did it.

By the way, if you haven't used CrimeReports, I recommend it -- it's free and available at http://www.crimereports.com/. Crime reports are available for communities all over the US (the site says it covers about 400 communities representing about 25% of the population) and if you register with the site you can get e-mail alerts.

There's also an analytics page, which allows you to select a community and get several charts showing crimes over a given time period, which crimes are most prevalent, and a trending map showing how crimes have increased (or haven't) over time."

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: ResearchBuzz, 27 July 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on July 28, 2009 (boomark / email).