Crime Mapping, Google Maps Style (Rock on Garner NC PD!)

Crime and incident mapping is probably one of the most valuable tools you can have. It doesn't matter if you are trying to secure a city or an office park it's helpful to know what kind of problems happen by location and time. Most institutions track this in one form or another, and some even spend thousands of dollars on crime mapping software, or even expensive add-ons to their records management software. That's not necessary - and although it could be the right fit for some organizations, I hate to see others spend money on it when they don't have to.

No secret I'm a huge Google supporter, and I've been using Google Maps pretty much exclusively for some time now. Even their mobile version works smoothly, I've got it loaded on my PalmTreo and get satellite images, traffic status and great search features. What makes Google apps great is how open they make the programming. They figure that if they release a core product to the world the talent out there can apply it in ways their internal staff would never think of. Even with the standard Google Maps you can create your own personal maps and mark them up as desired. You can plot locations, mark routes, area and all sorts of things. To take it one step further, you can share your map with either invited guests only or anyone.

So, it's been possible for some time to use Google's mapping service to map crime data. Some institutions have been doing it by using Google's design on their internally hosted LAN sites or even internet. But in recent months the Google Maps design team has been adding all sorts of features that make it much easier to do, so now we're seeing some great uses.

Check out the Google Maps Blog, they have a post about a Brazilian site that's using Google Maps to produce their WikiCrimes feature.

And what's this? At the bottom of the post I see that The Garner North Carolina Police Department is featured as well. There's a link to their website to check out their mapping feature.

Yep, as you can see the data is limited to the Garner NC area only - but still pretty cool. They let you search by proximity to an address and select what crime data you want to display.

They even have a cool table on the side that lists the results by crime type, date and address. They also feed their data into a Google Earth overlay - sweet.

If you're interested, take your IT guy out to lunch and ask him to check out the Google Maps API and see what they can work out.

Now, the secret to good crime mapping or even crime tracking / analysis is having accurate and consistent data. How effective is it, if each time an incident happens at the "Bradford Building" the officer recording the incident calls it "The B-Building" or "Bradford" or even "Badford Bld"? If you're using a standard database that doesn't use smart word association - than you're going to get a separate location entry for each possible variation of the name or address. For mapping functions you may just get a lot of errors. The best way to do it is to have drop down menus that officers or records staff can choose the name or address of a location rather than enter the text themselves.

One of the largest drawbacks to traditional crime mapping through address-based systems is if you are on a college campus, medical center / park or corporate campus than your street names may be private, and not on most mapping reference sources. If that's the case I've seen it done by using the organization's existing GIS platform. With GIS you are referencing grid data and plotting more than addresses, and a lot of institutions already use GIS for engineering functions. The better systems I've seen for this also incorporate GPS readers so that when the officer is on site, they can grab the grid coordinates and enter them into the report.

Of course another consideration is the security of information you're broadcasting. If you're already releasing crime reports to the general public than I'd just use that data so it's already been cleared for release. If not, I'd put some thought into what you're releasing and why. If it's just for your own internal use, than I'd suggest keeping it behind your firewall. If you have people not connected to your network but still need to see it, you could set up a VPN connection.

And - just another note - the Garner PD has an RSS feed available.

I'm glad to see this catching on, with more an more law enforcement and security sites using RSS to get information out quickly.

If you're not familiar with RSS let me know, I'd be more than happy to point you to some good apps and techniques. With RSS feeds I can cover over 75 news and media sources a day specifically, and key words and phrases in news stories/blogs globally.