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Thursday, September 29, 2016

neighbor asks if there is interest in tracking neighborhood crimes, etc.

See this 09-28-2016 message from a neighborhood resident:

Question: Is there anyone in the neighborhood tracking crimes, dates, locations, types, police activity, resolution of cases, Including perhaps those neighbors' reports that did not make it to the police and/or including those cases where neighbors came out to help deter or scare off a possible thief/perpetrator. Including perhaps linking to related surveillance videos, pictures, descriptions etc. and collecting all of this (and making it available publicly) in one place?  

I would imagine this to be a valuable database.  Unfortunately, I don't think I have the time to implement such project, but I wonder if anyone else has thought of this — and better yet — might have started compiling material?

And to consider if this would indeed be helpful and/or whether there be legitimate concerns about such project.
 

4 comments:

  1. It might be useful in identifying what may look like the same perpetrator (s) or geographic areas where we need more focused police presence.....

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  3. The DC Geographic Information Services (DCGIS) offers a portion of what you are looking for. Reported crimes can be mapped to the block level, and not block address. Unreported crimes would be hard to deal with. Finally, most of the current surveillance videos would be private data, and there are challenges in collecting private data. The local Yahoo and Google groups also prove to be a good searchable database for high visibility crimes over the years. For example, most murders are discussed in these groups, and the available data goes back years if not decades.

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