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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
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.