Haydain Neale, 1970–2009
The Making of a Medley
Newsstand: November 23, 2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
The Daily Photoist: November 23, 2009
Want to be vaguely alarmed? Hop on over to SpotCrime's Toronto map. Since July 18, SpotCrime has been using Toronto Police data to map individual crimes across the city, complete with cute little icons (fire means arson!). Founder Colin Drane, who lives in Baltimore—"one of the highest crime rates per capita in the US," he noted in an e-mail to Torontoist—has created maps like these for cities all around the world, including his holy-crap hometown and the so-blank-it-must-be-a-mistake Tokyo.
Aside from being the product of a city whose homicide rate in 2006 was twenty-four times greater than Toronto's (seriously), Drane has other motives for his project: he "strongly believe[s] crime data should be in the hands of the public," and he'd "like to make some money by delivering that data in [the] best and easiest to access format[s]—iPhone, RSS, e-mail, text messaging, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Facebook." If you want text messages or e-mails whenever a crime happens in your neighbourhood, that can be arranged.
However interesting it is to glean from, SpotCrime is a little off-putting—and not for what it presents but for what it doesn't. It's not that knowledge about local crime is bad; quite the opposite. The more people know, the better. It's just that tools like SpotCrime present only a sketch of the problem: without crime rates, without information about whether an incident has cleared or not, without information about the relationship between (alleged) victims and perpetrators, and without consistent treatment of crime from various cities' police agencies, those looking for a more complete and thus more accurate picture don't have much to go on. (One example of an assault listing at Dufferin and Steeles: "The suspect stabbed a woman with a knife in the neck. A woman is in serious condition with non-life-threatening injuries." Or look at how Ottawa seems to have a way bigger vandalism problem than Toronto does.)
SpotCrime spots crime, to be sure, but appearances don't tell the whole truth. And especially when it comes to crime, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
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Gotta love Baltimore...who could resist burglary, Ace of Cakes, and Beehive hairdos?
The Star has had a similar map for at least a couple of years (I think they only show homicides). I agree with the author - without additional data to provide context, it's just a gimmick: "hey, look - our hood is safe/safety-challenged/unsafe/hellhole!"
The Star's homicide map has homicides going back to 2005, but, as you said, panko, the incidents are presented without much context (even though the Star could, say, easily have linked to archived articles their staff had written about the incidents as a nice start). Either way, there are still lots of interesting maps on the Star's map of the week blog, like gun ownership and dog ownership.
Montreal, like Tokyo, is apparently 100% crime-free according to these maps. I guess the fact that a city is in the list doesn't mean they have matched it up with data yet?
Ya and its not like the criminals hang out where they commit crimes, you can get jumped anywhere, these areas are not exclusive to illegal acts
I checked the map and apparently there was a robbery on my street corner.
I read the entry and apparently two 16-18 year old males on bicycles approached a 20 year old male and demanded to know what he had in his pockets. When someone else approached the scene they fled empty handed.
That's considered a robbery? I've seen more threatening behavior than that in a schoolyard.
The concept is pretty dumb, but the information could loosly prove usefull for the police investigations, but not really for the public. Like StayMaitland said, you can completly avoid those streets for a false sense of security and end up getting jumped somewhere else not marked on the map.
I tried doing this for a while, like before CrimeSpot came out, in an effort to try to get residents of my building to pay better attention to the security issues in and around our building, but then I realized the same thing.
That unless you were keeping tracks of the crimes on one side, and the success of the police on the other, the map was totally skewed, giving a false impression that we were in deeper trouble than actually was the case.
Crimes involving people should show where those people came from. Think of shootings and stabbings in the entertainment district, chances are neither participant lives there.
Rek, yeah... That would bring out new problems regarding privacy of the families of the agressors. You can't control where problems happen, they happen because they happen.
PLUS the fact that alot of criminal activity is set into motion by the bored youth. You can't display information on who they are or where they live, we have whats called the Youth Criminal Justice Act.