Police Commissioner Patrick Carroll made an excellent presentation last week on Crimemapping.com, a service which Talk of the Sound has been recommending to the City Manager and New Rochelle Police Department since 2009. It took Mayor Noam Bramson all of 5 seconds to declare the idea of a publicly-available crime map an “anti-marketing campaign” for New Rochelle. The other Democrats on Council wasted no time echoing the sentiments of their leader with Barry Fertel expressing his “concern” that residents would require “education” to understand the map in context. The Democrats on Council made it clear that they believe that New Rochelle are stupid to read a map or understand what 12 reported assaults over two weeks on their block means. The Mayor killed the idea and sooner after the New Rochelle crime map data was taken off-line.
http://spotcrime.com/ny/new+rochelle
Enter Colin Drane of Baltimore via the UK. Drane is the founder and President of SpotCrime.com, a competitor of Crimemapping.com with the difference that they will report crime data with or without the cooperation of local governments. Hearing how the Mayor pulled the plug on the Crimemapping.com solution for New Rochelle, Drane offered to set up the same thing for New Rochelle at no cost using public records obtained under FOIL. Talk of the Sound is making daily FOIL requests for the crime data from the New Rochelle Police Department and will submit it to SpotCrime.com on a daily basis.
Users can select specific crime-types, data ranges and move the maps around to expand or narrow the view.
SpotCrime.com is a Baltimore-based company found in October 2007 and privately owned by ReportSee, Inc. It provides nationwide crime information about arrests, arsons, assaults, burglaries, robberies, shootings, thefts and vandalisms, on a Google map. The data is mainly from police departments, news reports and user-generated content. Anyone can access these maps and have the option to sign up to receive free crime alerts via email and text (SMS). The email alert includes a map and crime details that has occurred in the specified area. SpotCrime.com is a member of the Emerging Technology Center (ETC) in Baltimore.