If the police departments (and I'm looking at you BCPD) would just open up a nice RSS feed of data they already gather I'd bet you'd have several people looking to creatively map crime using the woderfully useful Google Maps.

Oh and you might want to check out SpotCrime (http://spotcrime.com/md) they map various crime in Maryland.

Moving forward, I hope we can go towards a map that works like this : http://gothamist.com/map/

The "spotcrime" map takes forever to load and is terribly hard to read. It ends up looking muddled and poorly laid out.

Actually, Paul is spot-on. If you look at what Washington DC has done in regards to revolutionizing the delivery of data and services, and we pale in the city occasionally called the "Digital Harbor." By letting data be fed, anyone can create their mashups.

I looked at the city's online statistics, and the amount of data available is pathetic to say the least. I have railed against this before on my own blog. With the CitiStat initiative, is this really that difficult?

Look at the stuff folks have done on appsfordemocracy.org for the District. Why not do this in Baltimore?

Interesting, Peter. The vast majority of agencies in Maryland are extremely happy with CrimeReports.com, both small and large. There is one vocal naysayer, Phil Canter (a crime analyst at the Baltimore County PD), who was developing a competing crime mapping tool before the state made a deal with CrimeReports. I suspect his frustration with CrimeReports is more personal than professional.

As for the Tax payers footing the bill. CrimeReports is only $99-$199 a month per agency, which is much cheaper than each agency creating it's own internal crime mapping resource. Ask any agency and they'll tell you the same thing.

One of the great things about having the majority of Maryland agencies use one system like CrimeReports is the fact that if all the agencies are on the same system, then it makes sharing information between agencies much easier. If everyone is on a different system, then both police and citizens can't see crime beyond the borders of their own district. CrimeReports helps police agencies be more transparent with the community and allows for more data sharing between agencies, which are all good.

From Peter: What I object to is taxpayers being charged for a private company to collect data that is considered to be public in the first place. Your company has found a way to turn a profit with information that any public citizen should get for free. The problem is that when we try to get the same information, either for crime maps or another story, we're sometimes being told that we can't it because it contractually belongs to CrimeReports.com. We have enough trouble getting the information in the first place -- most agencies don't want to part with it because of the political implications of crime.

I just wanted to respond to the comment alleging that my problems with CrimeReports.com were due to “personal” reasons. If the writer is implying that I take my work seriously and “personally”, then I say “thank you”. I suspect, however, that this comment was meant to have a different connotation. It is true that I was involved in the development of a public domain crime mapping application under the auspices of the US Department of Justice. For some reason, the writer seemed to think that I viewed CrimeReports.com as a competing interest. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Hopefully the following points will provide a better understanding of the issues. First, I welcome the state’s efforts to provide initial funding for police agencies to participate in an interactive mapping service (IMS) like CrimeReports.com. It is a great idea and long overdue. Crime analysts in the Baltimore Region have always believed that it is important to share tactical crime information. This idea led to the creation of the Baltimore Region Crime Analysis System (RCAS) in 1997, and in the development of the Regional Crime Analysis Geographic Information System (RCAGIS) a couple of years later. Indeed, it was the Department of Justice who approached analysts in the Baltimore Region to participate in the RCAGIS project. At the time, the Baltimore Region was a model for regional cooperation, leading Justice to select our region as a development site. Consequently, the development of RCAGIS was a joint project involving the input of crime analysts in the Baltimore Region. I was one of several analysts involved in the design and implementation of RCAGIS. I am proud of RCAGIS (it is still used today) but I can not take sole credit for its implementation; nor do I have any emotional tie to the program. We also recognize that some police departments do not want to use RCAGIS (it runs on an ESRI platform, one of several platforms used for GIS). Primarily for this reason, I strongly support police departments sending incident data for use in an IMS. Baltimore County Police send data to both CrimeReports.com and SpotCrime.com. We have also sent a test data feed to the Sunpapers (actually going back several weeks ago), and we will place them into production once we have an opportunity to review their maps. Analysts in the Baltimore Region understand the importance of knowing what’s going on in neighboring jurisdictions. This includes our ability to see a regional crime map. More importantly, it’s great that the public can see the types of incidents and their respective interpolated locations in and around their neighborhoods. This brings me to my second point. Second, my primary concern with CrimeReports.com and any other similar IMS is that the incident data shown on these maps are usually derived from a 911 CAD data feed. The addresses from CAD data are geocoded, resulting in the point symbols shown on a map. One big problem, however, is that CAD addresses are difficult to geocode. There are many reasons for this, but some of the address problems include abbreviated street names, incorrect street suffixes (RD, CT, Circle, etc.), misspelled street names, etc. In fact, a fairly common concern expressed on the NIJ MAP listserve is the problem of crime IMS accurately identifying incident locations. I share these concerns. We review point locations shown on a map for both CrimeReports.com and SpotCrime.com. The fact is incident locations are occasionally placed at wrong locations. This causes unnecessary concerns among the public who might see an incident in their neighborhood that did not occur. It is a problem that will always exist with geocoding addresses, and will only be corrected once officers use a GPS to transmit coordinates that can be attached to an incident location (not too far off in the future, I might add). Third, another problem I found with CrimeReports.com was that they once mistakenly showed a large number of incidents as homicides. Imagine my horror when checking the site one day and seeing a bunch of icons associated with homicide appearing all over Baltimore County! To the credit of CrimeReports.com they immediately fixed the problem. I must note, however, that despite a number of phone calls to CrimeReports.com they still have not told me how that happened. To my knowledge, this has not occurred again, but it does cause me to question the QA/QC procedures that are being used by these companies. Fourth, I am not developing a crime mapping application, and I am certainly not developing a mapping application that would compete with CrimeReports.com or SpotCrime.com (I’m a crime analyst, and barely have time for this response). I am working with a team of crime analysts in the Baltimore region to develop the next generation of tools that can be used for tactical crime analysts. This mapping application, which is being developed by Baltimore Police Department, is designed for use by police managers and analysts to help in the identification of crime problems, crime series, hot spots, suspect identification, and management reports. Neither CrimeReports.com nor SpotCrime.com have this functionality. This new application is not in competition with the crime Interactive Mapping Services that are currently being used. In fact, they are completely different applications for different uses. Fifth, rather than making this discussion one that attacks an individual for no reason, why not address the real problems that I have pointed out with the aim making these applications truly beneficial. I wonder, for example, why the State is paying for data to be sent to CrimeReports.com when in fact the Maryland has an excellent web mapping site (MD iMAP) that could easily display the same data shown in CrimeReports.com. Hopefully this will be considered sooner than later. I hope my response serves to clarify my thoughts on this matter, and particularly in response to the individual who thought my opinions were “personal” rather than “professional”. This person clearly does not have any understanding of my past involvement in this technology, nor in my professional position of open and honest crime mapping and reporting. I wonder if their department can say the same. Thank you.