updated 7:30 p.m. ET,
Mon., Feb. 4, 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 police 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 of crimes in locations of interest within a
day.
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 such as the one in Chicago that do not pay
Public Engines because they had built their own links into their
records.
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 better planning responses.
But these internal
records generally do not come in a uniform, Web-friendly fashion. Even
Web sites with crime maps, like the one operated by police in
Washington, D.C., don't reveal details on individual reports. Instead
such details often are made available in police logs sent to local
newspapers.
What's new in
CrimeReports.com is its system for extracting the files from disparate
police databases.
Then it maps them
online in one central location, through an easy Web trick known as a "mashup."
Since Google Inc. opened its mapping software to third-party
applications, free mashups like this have sprung up to let people plot
everything from photograph locations to the sources of campaign
donations.
One participant in
CrimeReports.com, Sheriff Jim Winder of Salt Lake County, said the $200
monthly fee will be worthwhile 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. He added that the
site's ability to make use of his department's "byzantine" records
system was "almost revolutionary."
Officer Melanie
Hadley, a spokeswoman for police in Montgomery County, Md., said that
before working with CrimeReports.com, her agency could offer no search
engine to let people "pinpoint exactly what was going on" in certain
areas.
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 that kind of
information was always available in department records, "`public' and
`readily accessible' are two different things," Winder said.
CrimeReports.com's
likely users might be prospective home buyers or neighborhood watch
groups seeking insights into criminal activity. Yet it's unclear whether
seeing all the police reports from a certain neighborhood will provoke
more paranoia than caution.
"It's not our job to
censor or to limit or preclude the information we give out," Winder
said. But he added: "It is a double-edged sword. More data doesn't
always equate knowledge."
Whisenant acknowledges
that the site needs to improve its user friendliness. For example,
clicking icons for police reports in San Jose brings up such arcane
notations as "Final Disposition: A" and "Call Type: 242."
