TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Online Initiative Puts Crime Reports On The Map

ADVERTISEMENT

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, The Associated Press

Published: February 5, 2008

The inspiration for CrimeReports.com came a decade ago when Greg Whisenant made the mistake of letting a stranger, who turned out to be a burglar, into his apartment building in Arlington, Va.

At a neighborhood meeting that soon followed, Whisenant was surprised to hear a woman say she had been followed in a parking lot. Whisenant pondered how technology could make a difference.

"Why can't we have some kind of alert system that would tell me something like that?" he wondered.

Now, he has created it. A new service on CrimeReports.com, launched last year and expanding nationwide, overlays crime reports on maps, so people can view where arrests and other police calls have been made. Users can configure e-mail alerts to notify them within a day of crimes in locations of interest.

The free site relies mainly on police departments paying $100 or $200 a month, depending on their size, to have CrimeReports.com extract the information from their internal systems and publish it online. Public Engines LLC, Whisenant's seven-person company in Salt Lake City, pledges to post no ads on the site.

About 40 law enforcement agencies have signed up, including police in San Jose, Calif., and several Utah jurisdictions. The site also captures and posts information from departments that built their own links into their records. The only Florida listing is for Pembroke Pines.

This coincides with a prominent trend in policing. Since New York City police launched their "CompStat" system in 1994, law enforcement agencies around the country have been capturing and analyzing crime information in more careful detail, in hopes of planning responses better.

But these internal records generally do not come in a uniform, Web-friendly fashion. Even Web sites with crime maps, such as the one operated by police in Washington, D.C., don't reveal details on individual reports.

What's new in CrimeReports.com is its system for extracting the files from disparate police databases, then mapping them online in one central location.

One CrimeReports.com participant, Sheriff Jim Winder of Salt Lake County, said the service is worth $200 a month mainly because the site provides a new way to increase his agency's public transparency.

"For people to have faith in and continue to be supportive of law enforcement, they need to feel we're divulging all we possibly can," he said.

This flood of information could have its downsides.

CrimeReports.com lists only the block on which a crime occurred or was reported, not the actual address, so as to protect victims' privacy. Even so, the Salt Lake sheriff noted that neighbors on a tiny street might be able to figure out, say, which house on their block had a domestic incident that the participants would rather keep quiet.

While such information was always available in department records, "'public' and 'readily accessible' are two different things," Winder said.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT