City debuts Seattle crime map |
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The city of Seattle has launched a new online crime map, built on Microsoft's Bing Maps, that gives an interactive view of crime in our little burg, based on police reports. It's a worthwhile application, part of the broader trend of governments making data more accessible, and it's a good way to get a sense for what's really happening in your neighborhood, or one you're thinking about moving to.
Even better, the existing Seattlecrime.com site reports that it has been able to integrate the extra data provided by the city to make its Seattle Crime map even more useful. Seattlecrime.com's Jonah Spangenthal-Lee explains in a post this morning that the site has added the extra data about such incidents as robberies, prostitution and kittens stuck in trees to the real-time fire, medic and police 911 responses already on its map.
So if the dreary weather wasn't already making you rethink your decision to live here, now you can spend your time obsessing about all the crime happening around you.
As noted in this SPD Blotter blog post, the city's crime map is based on police reports (which are also now available online) with items appearing on the map some 12 hours after the reports are processed.
Compared with the city's map, the real-time 911 elements of Seattlecrime.com are much more timely -- useful for finding out what's happening not long after you hear sirens. Seattlecrime.com, for the record, uses Google Maps for its application.
Via email, I asked Spangenthal-Lee if he was worried about the city's new map competing with Seattlecrime.com. He joked that if the city keeps it up, he "might just have to become a masked vigilante and move in on SPD's crime fighting turf."
"Really though, I think what SPD/the city's doing is great," he wrote. "We're very happy to have this data and to be able to incorporate it into our own map (which we just started doing yesterday) and iPhone app. We now have all the 911 data from medic and fire calls and police responses in one neat little package, which is pretty cool."
By the way, after spending some time with the city's new map, it struck me that it would be great to see this type of data integrated with Walk Score somehow, if someone hasn't already done that.
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