October 26, 2006
MPD Meets Mashup
Credit where due: the city government just did something fairly awesome. As the Post and WTOP are reporting, today dc.gov unveiled its new Crime Map application. Following in the footsteps of ChicagoCrime.org (itself the brainchild of the WaPo's own Adrian Holovaty), you can now plot reported incidents of crime throughout the city. You can filter by location, date and the type of criminal activity. It's an extremely compelling way to visualize differences over time and geography.
There are a few caveats. First, the site is dog-slow — but that probably has more to do with the influx of attention brought by today's media debut. More importantly, it only works in Internet Explorer for the moment (and it seemed a bit flaky even in our copy of MSIE7). Still, once we coaxed it into functionality, the site proved to be a well-realized and useful tool.
But more than this specific piece of programming, the city deserves credit for opening up its data to the public. Interested web nerds can head here to find RSS feeds containing the information that powers the new crime map. It's nice of the government to build a map for us, but if anyone finds it lacking, they now have the power to build their own (don't be surprised if you hear more from us on this front in the next few weeks). Three cheers for open government! Are you paying attention, WMATA?
Map of robberies near Logan Circle generated by the crimemap.dc.gov website
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the site only works with IE. Major letdown for me. Wasn't there a web developer in Mount Pleasant or Adams Morgan who did something similar using Google Maps and a database? It probably cost the city more to develop this than it would've to use open tools and standards. And there's no permanent link to it from the homepage. Just a tiny little blurb and link.
Shite usability aside, I suppose it's a good effort.
How is this different from http://www.crimeindc.org/, which has been up and running for a little while now (a mashup of crime reports and google maps of the city)?
Works okay on FF 1.5, just have to enter the date manually.
This is okay. Certainly MPD should be applauded for in recent years making crime information more accessable. But others have created their own versions of this sort of map using the same feeds, have had them up and running for months, and those actually work with Firefox etc.
IMO, the big issue continues to be that not all crimes are captured by the official stats, which provide the data for these maps. Calls for "shots fired", for example, simply aren't included in the stats. Perhaps this is because there is no hard evidence of the crime, unless they can catch a shooter or find a victim or casings, etc. I hope the recently discussed gunfire listening device might, in addition to improving MPD's ability to respond to gunfire, provide verifiable evidence that said gunfire occured in the first place.
Pickles:
Yup, that's my friend Tom Cochran -- and unlike the official jobbie, the site he coded manages to work in Safari, Firefox and the like. Maybe the city could have just paid for that? </snark>