False Positives: Remixing Crime with Gmaps

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Remixing Crime with Gmaps

Via Waxy.org: Links Archives: May 2005 we have Chicago Crime, A freely browse-able database of crimes reported in Chicago, viewable by Crime type/Street/Date/Police district, Mapped with Google Maps!! They drill down to a very fine level of Detail: the block or police beat, and how about getting a RSS (RSS 2.0) feed for that Block or police beat?

The data comes from a Chicago Police Department site, Citizen ICAM, that lets the public search for recently reported crimes, update once a day with only 90 days' worth of data and a week delay before crime reports are available online. (Do we have anything like this for Toronto?)

This might like giving a hypochondriac a encyclopedia of disease, but it's an amazing application, and value-add to a existing set of data: Business Intelligence (BI) for the DUY vigilante. I wonder if you could re remix it with Paul Rademacher's HousingMap remix of Craigslist and Google? Hm....Craigslist+Crime Reporting+GMaps = "Just why is that rent so cheap?"

Update:Boing Boing picked up the story. chicagocrime has linked back in Press.

And then there's a remix of Google Maps and Gasbuddy : Cheap Gas