CrimeScore: A Local Open Data Safety API

CrimeScore is a new local open data API by YourMapper that gives you a detailed safety grade at your current location.

CrimeScore: A Safety Rating for Your Location

Methodology

CrimeScore rating uses a propriety methodology based on address-level open data crime reports, weighted for type of crime, recency, and proximity, then adjusted by neighboring CrimeScore ratings, and finally statistically standardized across a bell curve based on all the CrimeScores across a city, updated daily.

Coverage Areas

Our nationwide crime rating for your location is available in the following cities, with more being added soon.

• San Francisco, CA
• Washington, DC
• Anchorage, AK
• Louisville, KY
• Miami, FL
• Fort Worth, TX
• Chicago, IL
• Seattle, WA
• Indianapolis, IN
• Albuquerque, NM
• Richmond, VA
• Cincinnati, OH
• Atlanta, GA

Coming Soon:

• Portland, OR
• Kansas City, MO
• Lexington, KY
• Philadelphia, PA
• …and more

API Access

Directly access the CrimeScore API, with dynamic documentation and in-browser testing on Mashape.

Mashape CrimeScore API

Also, check out our GitHub repository for a server-side example using Mashape, and full code for an interactive online browser map.

Badges and Graphics

We have a variety of badges (download) you can use on your website or app that are color coded to show grades, and only require you to overlay the grade or score that we return for a location.

CrimeScore badge graphics

Pebble App

CrimeScore is a GPS enabled Pebble app that calculates a composite score based on the amount of crime in your immediate area.

Pebble CrimeScore: GPS Safety Rating

We’ve submitted it to Pebble’s online app challenge through ChallengePost.

If you have a moment, head over there and vote or leave a comment!

iPhone App

SafetyCheck is a mobile iphone app that gives you a CrimeScore rating at your current location. The app shows a rating from 1 to 10 of your current safety level, and the number of recent crimes in your area.  It uses the API to keep all the data processing server-side.

SafetyCheck Local iPhone App

Google Glass App

AskOpenData.com has integrated the CrimeScore API into his Washington DC Google Glass transit directions app called Ask Metro.  It lets you know the crime rating of the station you are headed to.

Ask Metro CrimeScore Integration

Your App?

Get starting adding a CrimeScore rating to your existing services, adding value and information for your new and existing clients.  Or come up with your own app or service based on ideas we haven’t even thought of yet!

Read more: http://blog.yourmapper.com/2014/03/crimescore-local-open-data-safety-api/#ixzz2wu8ZO8dm

Louisville Metro Partnership: Crime Incidents Map

The city of Louisville Metro has partnered with our government open data services and mapping company GovMapper to bring a daily crime incident reports map from the LMPD to the citizens of Louisville.

There are maps for every police division and beat in the city, with data updating daily.  The map customizations also allow the LMPD to include links to specific dynamic maps highlighting recent crimes for their community newsletter alerts.

Launched last week, this is the first time citizens can get daily crime updates from the LMPD with date range and category filtering.  

The service also includes mobile phone access, search exporting, and city-wide heatmaps of crime.  It allows full access to the raw data with latitude and longitude, fostering transparency and open data.  Programmers can also grab the data on-demand for their sites and apps through the Your Mapper API.

Your Mapper also curates a complimentary detailed historic crime reports map going back to 2003, which is updated every month.

Saving the City Money

I credit the office of Mayor Greg Fischer with helping to get this project started (via a tweet in June), and seeing the opportunity for cost savings from public online mapping.  From there Metro Technology Services took over to bring the map to fruition.  They turned to us, the only area Google Qualified Maps Developer.

One of MTS's goals is to save the city, and therefore taxpayers, money across all departments.  They know that by promoting government transparency and open data by putting data online in a way the general public could understand and use would have a huge ROI by reducing the thousands of FOIA requests the city has to fill.  If the public can discover, visualize, and export the data they need online 24/7, then wouldn't have to contact the city for time-consuming data requests.

Another goal of MTS is to create a catalog of raw open data for the public to download and use on their desktop, on websites, and in mobile apps.  To this end they have Louisville's Open Data Initiative, which aggregates data across agencies.  GovMapper has enhanced their raw crime data by adding latitude and longitude to each report, and then providing the entire dataset for download on the public open data site (see CrimeStats.txt).

The Impact of Maps on Crime - Atlantic Montly Shows How Sharing Crime Data Leads to Action

In the newest July 2008 issue of Atlantic Monthly, contributing editor Hanna Rosin tackles the question "Why is crime rising in so many mid-sized American cities?"

The answer was discovered when the police shared their data with someone who created a visual map (seen in the print magazine) of the problem. The North Memphis police shared their crime data with University of Memphis criminologist Richard Janikowski, and he turned that data into an answer.

He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

By sharing their data, the police were able to let a private citizen create a tool for them, and obtain new information in the process. It was a win-win situation, and a great reason for government data transparency.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged... Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city...

What he came up with ended up showing a correlation between new Section8 housing and crime, a very unpopular and controversial result, and something not intuitively discoverable.

Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with [a] map of Section8 rentals... On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Most of the article deals with the implication of this outcome and how to handle it, and the complex socio-economic issues it raises.

On a side note, our Louisville police chief also got involved, and a University of Louisville professor was looking at these patterns too.

The “Gathering Storm” report that worried over an upcoming epidemic of violence was inspired by a call from the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky, who’d seen crime rising regionally and wondered what was going on. Simultaneously, the University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime.

It's great to see such a terrific outcome come from the sharing of public data and is just the sort of thing the OMG Standard is trying to accomplish. A success story, but it only came because of the years of trust that Janikowski garnered by working with the local police full time. Months or years could have been shaved off the timeline if the data was made easily available to the public from the beginning.

Tutorial: How and Why to Bookmark a Search

Bookmarks on Metro Mapper allow you to save and share a particular search and let others see what you have found. It's free, quick, easy, and fun!

1. First, sign up for an account. Then login when you first visit the site.


2. Now when you visit a map, you see a link that lets you create a bookmark at the top of each map on the site.


3. Select some Filter options to the left of each map. These let you narrow down your results and create some interesting results. Click a Filter box to open it, then select the options you want to search for.


4. Do an address search on the map you are on (or drag and zoom the map to where you want the center to be and select Center of Map), then click "Update Map." This will recenter the map where you want and show you the closest items that match your selected Filters.


5. You can zoom into your results, drag the map around, and select the type of view you want (Satellite, Map, or Hybrid). You are setting up the map for a bookmark, which is like snapshot of your current view.


6. When you are ready, click the "Bookmark, Email, or Save this Map" link at the top of the map. You will then save this search and view to your account, and see an information popup on your map.


6b. (Optional) If you'd like, click on "Add Description." This will show you a popup where you can type in the name of your Bookmark. For example "Highgate Springs and Bon Air severe crimes in 2007." This will help you remember all the details of your map, and shows up on your account page. You can create or edit this description later.

7. From the Bookmark popup, you can see a text link to your bookmark, and can highlight the link to copy it, bookmark in your browser, or email it to someone else. Once you are done, click "Close Popup" to return to your map.


8. Your Bookmark is saved to your account. Click "My Account" at the top of the page. You can see a list of all your Bookmarks. For each one, you can email it, save it to your browser, view it, or edit the description using the icons to the left.


9. You are done! You can have as many bookmarks as you'd like. Then you can share them with your friends and the world and post them on websites, blogs, forums or comments on articles.

Note that the points in your bookmarks might change as the data gets updated. For example, if a restaurant gets an updated health review, the old review won't show up anymore on your bookmark. Bookmarks really save your center location and map search options for later, not every point on the map at a moment in time.

Here are a few interesting map bookmarks I made to get you started. Feel free to bookmark my bookmarks to your own account!

1. Restaurants with 86% or less health score.


2. Highlands restaurants with 99-100% health score.


3. Severe crimes around Highgate Springs and Bon Air in 2007.


4. Old Louisville's Historic District.


5. Homes for sale up to $150,000 around Highview.


6. Reported severe crimes committed by white males around Central Park.


7. Sex Offenders near Tom Sawyer State Park.


8. Prostitution reports by offender type near Pleasure Ridge Park.
   

Make some of your own bookmarks and if they are interesting, post them to the comments right here.

Crime Updated for December

We've updated the crime map to include the newest report data for Metro Louisville and Jefferson County, through December 12, 2007. Use the Date Range filter on the left of the map to see what's newly occurred around your home or office.

For each crime, click the "Details" button in the popup to see more details about the case, including a description of what happened.

We've also updated our Crime Mapplet, so those of you that use it will see the new crimes automatically.

Note: This will probably be the last time we post in the blog about a crime update. Just expect to see them monthly. If you want to follow our data updates as they happen, and for other minor notices and info, please follow our Twitter stream.

Crime Map Updated to November

We've updated the crime map to include the newest report data for Metro Louisville and Jefferson County, through October 29, 2007. Use the Date Range filter on the map to see what's newly occurred around your home or office.

For each crime, click the "Details" button in the popup to see more details about the case, including a description of what happened.

We've also updated our Crime Mapplet, so those of you that use it will see the new crimes automatically.

Louisville Metro Police Department: MetroWatch Map

The LMPD launched a new service yesterday called MetroWatch. It's an interactive online crime mapping tool that maps neighborhood crimes reported during the last 30 days. It's an okay first stab at a public mapping service, but I think there are a number of issues with the implementation.

What Metro Mapper does better:

1. More Data. Has 2-4 years of data available, instead of 30 days.
2. More Crimes. Shows all crimes reported, instead of just some.
1. MetroWatch: Assault, Auto Theft, Burglary, Homicide, Robbery, Theft, Vandalism
2. Metro Mapper: Arson, Homicide, Assault, Kidnapping, Bribery, Larceny/Theft, Burglary, Motor Vehicle Theft, Vandalism, Pornography, Drugs/Narcotics, Prostitution, Embezzlement, Robbery, Blackmail, Sex: Forcible, Forgery, Sex: Nonforcible, Fraud, Stolen Property, Gambling, Weapon Violations, Miscellaneous
3. Faster. Shows results immediately, and once loaded allows instantaneous panning and zooming on the maps, instead of waiting for each map change to load.
   
4. More Information. MetroWatch only shows the address of the report, where Metro Mapper shows address, location type, date and time, offender info (sex, race, age), sub-category of crime, counts of crime, and distance from your address.
5. Search Options. Metro Mapper lets you see only the types of crime you want to see. You filter your search with start and end date, types of crime, offender info, crime severity, and locations of the crime. For example, you could get a map of only crimes reported in the last year relating to sexual abuse at bars or restaurants where the offender is a white male.
6. Extra Overlays. With our Mapplets, you can overlay the crime reports with the location of registered sex offenders in your neighborhood. Or if you are looking for a home, see the most recent homes for sale, then show the crimes that occurred around that home. And then you can email the map to your friends, or view it in Google Earth.
   

What MetroWatch does better:

1. Quicker Updates. Until the LMPD puts their publicly available crime data on their public website (like other US cities do) for all to use (instead of just sending it privately to LOJIC), my data will be a few days/weeks/months out of date. Requests for data can take a long time due to the LMPD process and paperwork.
2. Street Names. Since LOJIC's maps are city run, they can update their street names quickly, so if a name changes, it's reflected right away. Names don't change that much, so I'm really grasping at straws here. Google's maps are from a national database, so their updates are a bit slower.
   

So now, a year and a half after my first crime map was live, LOJIC and the LMPD have a chance to show off theirs.

What do you think?

New Mapplets: Crime, Sex Offenders, Real Estate

We've added 3 new mapplets for crime, sex offenders, and daily updated real estate listings. Mapplets give you the power to overlay Metro Mapper's, other people's, and your own data all at once on the same map. We keep it up to date, and you view the results all at once on your own Google map, available from any computer!

Add them to your maps page from the Google Maps Directory.