When I first started this crime blog last year, one of the first web sites I linked to was bankbandits by the FBI's Baltimore office. An agent, Jeff Cisar, who investigates bank robberies in Montgomery County, built it to keep surveillance pictures up forever.

He was frustrated that newspapers only ran them sometimes, and then only in the most dramatic robberies. Most banks are held up by people armed with notes, and sometimes even the customers don't know the bank is being held up. Those don't tend to make the front page.

And people love to see mug shots. Pages and pages of them. And that's what Cisar offers with his site. You can go online and look at dozens of bank robbers caught in the act. There's a page for the ones who have been captured, and links to similar sites around the country.

I met Cisar at a conference earlier this week at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York where we appeared together on a panel exploring the news media, crime reporting and the Internet. One audience member asked a very good question about how the relationship beteen journalists and the media has changed with the web. See column here.

Police agencies have always inundated newspapers and TV stations with mug shots of people they want for crimes and urge us to run them. Many times we do because it serves the greater public good -- helps take bad guys off the street and qualifies as news. But we don't run all of them; we decide what we think is newsworthy.

Cisar's website is great, but it's limited to a list of pictures and most general information about the crimes. Newspapers want more information -- how was the bank held up, was it held up before, was anyone hurt, how many banks have been held up in the area and is that more or less than the previous year. We like to put today's crime into context. I would love for this bank robbery site to be searchable -- to be able to plug in an address of a bank or a neighborhood and see how many banks have been robbed, and how many times my branch has been hit.

But this becomes a problem. Law enforcement often doesn't want to give up this type of information, or information that would help us map out this crime or any other crime. I've been trying for nearly a year to get crime logs downloaded so we can produce crime maps of Baltimore and its suburbs. Thus far, only Anne Arundel County and soon Baltimore County have agreed to provide us this information.

Cisar's website is funded in part through the banking industry. While they want bank robbers caught, do they want to see a map showing the bank robberies at every branch in the area? Probably not.

But I fear that the bank robbery site will be become less and less interesting when all you can do is look at a bank of photos and not play around with how the information is displayed. I'm more interested in the bank being robbed down the street from my home than I am in a robbery in Bethesda, and more likely to run across the suspect in my own neighborhood.

It's a tough balancing act, but if more people look at the site, maybe more bank robbers will be caught, and the only way to get more people to view the site is to give them information they find useful.