MulderDSM on Wed, 3rd Sep 2008 4:21 pm 

There was a new article today on MSNBC that talked about these online crime information services. Our story on SpotCrime.com was good, but another service, FelonySpy.com is a hoax. Here’s some experts of what was said in the article:

“Unfortunately for the criminally curious, FelonSpy.com is a hoax. The realistic-looking arrest data plotted on it is randomly generated, says the site author, who spoke with msnbc.com on the condition of anonymity. ”

The article then goes on to talk about the service we are using, SpotCrime.com and it’s founder, Colin Drane, a Baltimore resident. SpotCrime.com operates now in 150 cities.

“It creates accountability for the powers that be,” he said. Recently, he had a GPS gadget stolen from his car in front of his home, and after filing a police report, felt underwhelmed by the response. “But if it’s at least a data point on a map, you can feel you did something, alerted your neighbors.”
SpotCrime doesn’t charge police departments to publish their data; instead Drane sells advertisements on his site. He also has a new site, UCrime.com, which offers similar service for college campuses around the country.

‘Subject to misinterpretation’
Police departments have used crime-mapping software internally for some time, but the sudden proliferation of public-facing crime mapping tools raises interesting questions. Databases have the same seductive quality as photographs, in that people tend to see them as infallibly accurate. In fact, both pictures and databases can lie, or at least be subject to interpretation. A police department that does a poor job feeding data into the system might appear safer than a nearby department that aggressively publishes incidents, for example. And a string of car thefts by one criminal could suddenly make one block stand out on a map of pushpins. That could be devastating to a homeowner who’s just put their place on the market.

“Crime data is subject to misinterpretation. That is a challenge. But this is a starting point,” Whisenant said, adding that he thinks the good far outweighs the bad. “The fact that it might be misconstrued doesn’t justify not sharing it. We are giving the public the ability to really be informed.”

Holovaty said an important debate has yet to take place about increased release of police data and other local information. In London, for example, some have complained that block-by-block publication of police reports will reinforce stereotypes about bad neighborhoods. But ultimately, he said, crime data belongs to the public.

“Every database is flawed, but having the data is better than not having the data,” he said.

There are other hazards which have emerged in the race to map crime data, says Holovaty. When municipalities turn to for-profit companies to publish public information, there’s a risk that the data will no longer be free to citizens. He says some towns’ relationship with CrimeReports is exclusive, and those towns refuse to share their crime data with his Everyblock project. SpotCrime’s Drane had the same complaint.

“I’m concerned about anything that creates a monopoly on this data,” Drane said.

Whisenant said his firm doesn’t sign exclusive contracts with municipalities, but some do find it inefficient to work with more than one vendor for crime mapping services.

Drane said he hopes there will be many “positive unintended consequences” to publication of the crime data. Citizens might provide additional, voluntary number-crunching and help police pick out patterns, for example. At a bare minimum, residents can get immediate word of a crime spree in their neighborhood and take prompt action — the same way homeowners now get warning that a bad weather is on the way.

“We want to be the AccuWeather of crime,” Drane said, referring to the popular weather forecasting site. “