CrimeReports.com, the leader in online crime-mapping, today announced it has raised $7.2 million in a Series B financing led by Austin Ventures, one of the nation’s leading venture and growth equity firms, with participation from existing investor vSpring Capital. This investment will enable CrimeReports to further expand its position as a leader in the rapidly growing public safety software market, introducing innovative web 2.0 tools to increase communication and collaboration between law enforcement agencies and their constituents.
CrimeReports.com has defined itself as the leader in adapting emerging web 2.0 technologies to the needs of law enforcement agencies and has experienced significant growth in recent months, expanding its client base by almost 20% over the last two months. This growth is fueled by an unprecedented enthusiasm by law enforcement agencies across the country to adopt these new tools to engage their communities through online crime-mapping, targeted analysis and social media. This rapid adoption also relies on CrimeReports’ innovative SaaS business model and pricing structure, which make it the most affordable suite of crime-mapping, communication and analytics solutions available.
“We are pleased to announce this investment led by Austin Ventures,” said Greg Whisenant, founder and CEO of CrimeReports. “This will allow us to expand our products and services in the coming months, offering law enforcement agencies of all sizes and budgets the additional tools they need to effectively engage citizens and reduce crime using social media and web 2.0 technology.”
“This commitment indicates our confidence in the vision and relevance of CrimeReports. The company has developed innovative web solutions that fill a real need in today’s law enforcement community,” said Mike Dodd, Venture Partner at Austin Ventures and CrimeReports board member. “CrimeReports’ continued strong growth is evidence that the market is ready for new ways to approach crime data and citizen involvement.”
The CrimeReports network now publishes crime data for more than 500 law enforcement agencies across North America and, earlier this year, released Command Central, a powerful yet affordable crime analytics and visualization tool for law enforcement agencies. The additional funding will allow CrimeReports to expand the functionality of its current products and expand its offerings to address the growing demand within the law enforcement community to adopt cutting-edge web-based social networking tools.
Analysts in Huntington, West Virginia, revealed at a recent city council meeting that they have found a correlation between bars in downtown Huntington and the location of violent crimes. As you can see in the picture at the right, they found that two major bar clusters (in blue) had significant overlap with clusters of recent violent crime (in red).
They are quick to point out that this analysis does not show a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and violent crime, but it does show a spatial correlation between bar locations and areas of high violent crime.
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.
Usually, here at the Neighborhood Crime Map, we’re talking about ways to provide citizens with easy access to crime prevention resources and crime data; however, in New Orleans, an initiative funded by the Afterschool Partnership has the goal to create maps that will keep kids out of trouble during the long hot summer months when they are out of school.
The maps will focus on providing information to kids and parents on the location of parks, community centers, and other places in the city that will keeps kids busy and out of trouble. Their hope is that this resource will provide youth with productive alternatives to just hanging out and will hopefully reduce crime for the summer months.
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.
DC communications and software design firm, Development Seed, has created a map of northwest Washington, D.C. that plots the location of bars/taverns and crime at StumbleSafely.com. The map is meant to inform happy bar goers of high-crime areas around popular D.C. watering holes.
The map can be filtered for three different time periods: day, evening, and night. And each time period displays crimes that were committed during that time of the day.
Although the map looks nice and has good intentions, it is not very useful. First, there is no legend to let you know what the symbols on the map mean. You have to play around with it for while to understand it. Second, the crimes plotted on the map have no details, and there is nothing on the site to indicate how recent the crimes are. Are they from last week? Last month? Last year? We don’t know.
Granted, the map was originally created to compete in the Apps for Democracy Competition. The goal of the competition was to promote transparency in government and present citizens with data solutions that take public information and present it in creative and useful ways. But without information like a legend or basic crime details, the map comes across as more annoying than useful.
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.
CrimeReports.com
Analysts in Huntington, West Virginia, revealed at a recent city council meeting that they have found a correlation between bars in downtown Huntington and the location of violent crimes. As you can see in the picture at the right, they found that two major bar clusters (in blue) had significant overlap with clusters of recent violent crime (in red).
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.
Stumble It!
The Neighborhood Crime Map 