Lately, there has been a widespread trend toward use of web 2.0 tools and social media in law enforcement. Although these tools are great for communication and maintaining connections between citizens and law enforcement, they—in and of themselves—will not decrease crime significantly. Sure, web 2.0 crime mapping can provide an advantage to neighborhood watch groups, but public-facing crime mapping will not necessarily reduce crime if it is not coupled with a variety of other personal crime-prevention strategies.
What we’re talking about is not simply looking at the results of crime, through crime mapping, statistics, and sharing crime tips through Facebook, but using that information to target physical aspects of the community that encourage crime. For neighborhood watch groups this means not just watching out for crime, but actively paying attention to physical aspects of your community that may increase chances for crime.
Physical Aspects of Your Neighborhood
Look around your community. How many neighbors have their porch light on at night? How many lawns look unkempt? How many houses have bushes under their windows? How many houses have large windows facing the street? How many houses have fences? The answers to these questions may help you root out some aspects that make your neighborhood more attractive to criminals.
Strategies
Overall street appearance, like nicely manicured lawns, attractive bushes, and accent lighting, sends a message to criminals that the homeowners care about their property and keep an eye on it—and might have security systems. Unkempt lawns and neglected trees and shrubs, are a sign that maybe other aspects of the home are untended too, like door and window locks.
Street and porch lighting deter criminals who generally don’t want to be in the spotlight. And, coupled with street-facing windows, make criminals feel uncomfortable, like they are being watched and could easily be identified.
At first, you would think that high fences would keep criminals out, but that is not always true. Waist-high fences or shrubs lining your property actually provide two benefits: they act as a barrier that is awkward to cross, and they give you street visibility. With high fences, you won’t know a criminal is coming until he hops the fence or enters the gate. With a waist-high barrier, you can them coming from a mile away.
Finally, there is a very simple way to block access to your windows, plant thorny bushes under them. I know it sounds kind of silly, but faced with the prospect of pushing his way through a thorn bush to get to your bedroom window, most criminals will pass your windows up for easier targets.
Solutions
These are all aspects of your property and neighborhood that you can control. Talk to your neighbors about implementing strategies to deter criminals before they even get to your house. In addition, you can talk to your city council about street-lighting issues as well as public signage (like neighborhood watch signs) and other physical aspects of your neighborhood that are city property.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is leading the way in sex offender tracking by issuing 6,000 GPS tracking bracelets to paroled sex offenders across the state.
The tracking bracelets send GPS information to a central server every 10 minutes so that analysts can map movement and anchor points for sex offenders. The system will also alert parole officers if a sex offender’s GPS data shows a correlation between a sex offender’s location and the time and location of a recent crime.
Clearly this system cannot predict a sex offender’s movements or the likelihood that he or she will re-offend; however, with the knowledge that their movements are being tracked, sex offenders will be less likely to travel into restricted areas and less likely to re-offend. And in the event that they are involved in a crime, the tracking system will make it easier to catch and prosecute the offenders.
Yesterday we just passed 500 fans on Facebook. We’ve only had the Facebook page up for a about 8 weeks, so we’re overjoyed that so many people are enthusiastic about their local crime prevention efforts and are using CrimeReports.com.
We want to thank every one of our law enforcement partners across the US and Canada and all the fans that have made our website the #1 crime-mapping website in the world.
Keep up your continued efforts to spread the word about CrimeReports.com, neighborhood watch efforts, and effective law enforcement/citizen communication and partnerships. And, as always, keep coming back here for more information on crime prevention, community involvement, and neighborhood watch.
Google just announced some improvements to its popular mapping program, Google Maps. Google Maps now includes icons for landmarks, places of interest, and major businesses. In addition, many of the icons are clickable and will bring up a picture, address, phone number, and—possibly—a Wikipedia article.
This new feature of Google Maps is good news for CrimeReports.com users. The addition of the new location icons will make it easier to get a tangible sense of the location and proximity of crimes plotted on the CrimeReports map. This increased spatial awareness can lead to a better understanding of where crimes are happening in relation to physical landmarks and businesses.
We at CrimeReports are all very happy about our recent growth and our record-breaking month of June. Below is a press release highlighting our recent success and the law enforcement community’s forward-thinking views on sharing crime information with the public:
June represents a record-breaking month for CrimeReports.com, signing new partnerships with 49 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. These new partnerships represent close to a 10 percent growth for the world leader in online crime mapping in the last month. Currently, CrimeReports publishes live crime information for close to 500 law enforcement agencies across North America and is working with more than 50 others that will begin publishing their crimes live within the next 60 days.
CrimeReports’ rapid growth indicates a trend in law enforcement away from traditional weekly crime blotters and toward the use of online communication, including social media, to disseminate crime information more quickly and efficiently. As a result, publishing crime maps and providing crime alerts, like those provided by CrimeReports, is quickly becoming the standard for forward-thinking agencies across North America. “From a customer service perspective, let’s get that online so people can do their own analysis of what’s going on in the neighborhood,” said Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, discussing CrimeReports in a recent Boston Herald article.
Although there are other crime-mapping websites, few can boast partnerships with more than a few dozen agencies, whereas CrimeReports is signing up an average of 30 agencies a month. “Our growth has been astounding,” said Greg Whisenant, Founder and CEO of CrimeReports. “We started with one agency just two years ago, so our explosive growth really shows how law enforcement agencies have been hungry for a service like this and have been amazingly forward thinking in adopting it so quickly.”
In addition, CrimeReports’ internal-facing analytics tool, Command Central, is now being used by nearly 50 agencies nationwide and will expand further in the coming months.
The Texas Department of Public Safety recently updated their sex offender website. The new website allows users to search for sex offenders by name, zip code, address, and more. And citizens can sign up for free email alerts for changes in an offender’s record or if they move. The improved site also provides more details information on the offender’s history and offenses, including offenses committed out of state.
A reporter at KEPR, the Pasco, Washington CBS affiliate, recently took crime data into her own hands and created a car theft crime map. The map highlighted areas of the city where car thefts, prowls, and burglaries are highest. When presented with the map, the local police denied the significance of the data on the map, and chalked it up to population density. If you go to the KEPR website, you can read or watch a video of the story.
Did the reporter identify a hotspot, or are the police right? Leave a comment.
Many states have recently created the new office of State Chief Information Officer (CIO), in order to streamline their information systems statewide. Making such a move, will better allow state agencies to share data and communicate with each other.
Teri Takai, Califonia’s new CIO, recently announced the appointment of Michael Byrne to the office of Geospatial Information Officer (GIO). Byrne’s job is to take all the data from across the state organize it into maps that can correlate information. Such correlation is done at smaller levels, like crime mapping, but Byrne will be able to use data at much larger level and seen correlation at a state level.
Government Technology reports this week on a video posted by California’s newly appointed Geographic Information Officer (GIO), Michael Byrne. In the video, posted below, Byrne explains the importance of state-wide GIS for data sharing and analysis. He gets to the heart of what GIS can do and what it can mean for state governments, and by extension, law enforcement.
What this means for you, is that California (and other states that have begun to appoint CIOs and GIOs) will be able to more efficiently share information about crime and homeland security issues.
Watch the video below to hear Byrne explain it in his own words.
Local San Francisco Designer Shawn Allen created the above map of San Francisco by overlaying the city’s cab routes with the location of trees in the city and local crime incidents pulled from CrimeReports.com.
I’m not sure the map is much use for anything, but it sure gives you an interesting and beautiful view of the city. You can read the full story at SF Weekly, as well as download a free high-resolution version of the map.
Middletown, New York’s police department just created a revamped website that pushes toward more transparency in policing. The new site has links to crime statistics, annual crime reports, three different ways to contact the PD and give tips, and is now using the new CrimeReports.com widget.
If you click on the Crime Mapping link, you’ll see a full version of CrimeReports embedded directly into the Middletown PD’s website. Now the transition from police department to CrimeReports is seamless, and citizens can search crime in their neighborhood without leaving the Middletown PD’s website.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the individual contributing bloggers and may not necessarily reflect the official or actual opinions of CrimeReports, its parent company Public Engines, or any of its employees.
Lately, there has been a widespread trend toward use of web 2.0 tools and social media in law enforcement. Although these tools are great for communication and maintaining connections between citizens and law enforcement, they—in and of themselves—will not decrease crime significantly. Sure, web 2.0 crime mapping can provide an advantage to neighborhood watch groups, but public-facing crime mapping will not necessarily reduce crime if it is not coupled with a variety of other personal crime-prevention strategies.
Yesterday we just passed 500 fans on Facebook. We’ve only had the Facebook page up for a about 8 weeks, so we’re overjoyed that so many people are enthusiastic about their local crime prevention efforts and are using CrimeReports.com.
We want to thank every one of our law enforcement partners across the US and Canada and all the fans that have made our website the #1 crime-mapping website in the world.
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