This week, the Orlando Police Department becomes the 31st law enforcement agency in Florida to share their crime data on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com. More than 4 million Floridians now have online access to crime information through the most widely adopted crime-mapping site in North America.
“We are providing information to the public that will significantly enhance our crime prevention and crime reduction efforts,” said Orlando Police Chief Val B. Demings. It’s a trend that has been building statewide for the last few years, and the addition of the Orlando PD will make it even easier for law enforcement across the state to share crime information with the public and with each other.
Pembroke Pines was the first Florida law enforcement agency to publish crime data on the National Crime Map back in October 2007. “CrimeReports allows residents of Pembroke Pines to obtain information about crimes that are occurring in their neighborhood,” said Sgt. Carlos Bermudez of the Pembroke Pines Police Department. He adds that CrimeReports has significantly reduced the amount of time they spend on routine information requests from the community; they can simply refer citizens to the website. “We are grateful that we can provide this service to our residents,” he added.
Over the past year, a national trend to share more data with the public has boosted state and local efforts to better inform the public through new technology. “Law enforcement agencies across Florida have caught the vision of public data sharing,” said Greg Whisenant, founder and CEO of CrimeReports. “They’re working together, forming better relationships with citizens, and really closing the information gap between law enforcement and the public.”
Orlando joins law enforcement agencies across the state who are already sharing crime information online, like St. Petersburg, Fort Myers, Daytona Beach, Port St. Lucie, and Ocala, as well as Collier, DeSoto, Flagler, Hardee, Levy, and Palm Beach counties. In the next few weeks, a host of other law enforcement agencies across Florida are also set to start publishing their crime data on the national map.
CrimeReports partners with over 700 law enforcement agencies across North America and publishes sex offender data for all 50 states. In addition, CrimeReports recently released a free iPhone app, so citizens can access crime information for all participating agencies while on the go.
James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.
Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com
It’s interesting to read about open access being provided through crimereports.com for all of these cities, but I am having trouble figuring out how to connect to the data feeds. There does not appear to be any xml form like georss, kml, or gml coming off the crimereports site…? Is there any form of direct download available?
How do you access these data for generating your own mashups along the line of open government community standards?
Unfortunately, CrimeReports can’t yet open up feeds for general download by the public. Of course, any citizen can get this same information by going to the police department and using an open records request, but it will be without the benefit of already being geolocated on a map. The way we are able to create our maps is through a piece of software that is installed inside the police department’s records database. That software formats the data so that we can use it and publish it on our website for the public. In order to do that we have to work directly with the police department and have their permission. But because we have that relationship, you can be assured that the data you see on the map is official.
As a taxpayer, I have a problem with government contracting with a sole source that is locking down the public data handed over by various LLE’s.
As a technologist, I know that it is minimal work to provide some sort of XML feed. It isn’t a matter of not being able to- it is a matter of not wanting to.
First and foremost, the government should be employing a contractor to publicly deliver this data via something like a REST API. After that, I am okay with taxpayer money being awarded to build a Google Maps mashup of the data, although that would likely be unnecessary since easy public access to the data would ensure multiple options for viewing the data.
Lots of good can be done with this data, if only it were capable of being accessed outside of the crimemaps web UI. A Google mashup like crimemaps is not the best possible use or end-all use of this data. Other mechanisms such as link analysis can end up being much more valuable than simply drawing markers on top of Google Maps.