Durham Announces New Crime Mapping Website
From the City’s press release
The Durham Police Department is pleased to announce a cooperative arrangement with Bair Software Inc. to provide cutting-edge crime mapping to the public. The new web site, www.raidsonline.com is designed to be a Regional Analysis & Information Data Sharing solution. In addition to the City of Durham, which will provide daily updates for the site, Raleigh and Cary are expected to start sharing data soon, allowing the public to have a regional perspective of crime for the first time. Although the Durham Crime Mapper (www.durhampolice.com/crimemapper.cfm) will continue to be the official crime mapping web site for the department, data will also be shared for publication on the RAIDS web site. CrimeMapper will still be the preferred source for users wanting to view crime for years prior to 2009. However, the RAIDS web site will provide the following additional benefits:
- Ability to view all UCR Part 2 crimes
- Google Maps interface, including satellite views
- Analytics for selected crime search results
- Frequency distribution
- Crime by day of week
- Crime type timelines
- Temporal topology
- One-click density maps (aka hot spots)
- Citizens-On-Patrol notification feature
The public is reminded that crime mapping web sites like RAIDS are designed to better inform the public concerning crime in their neighborhood, and should not be used for statistical analysis or comparison with other cities. This is a pilot project with the site developer, and no warranties are offered regarding the accuracy or completeness of the data, including the continued availability of the service. The complete terms of use and blog regarding features can be found at http://raidsblog.com/.
I’ve had a chance to play with the software a bit, and it seems to be pretty robust. If you are interested in the crime rates around a particular property, this seems like an effective tool to get the information you want.
Tags: Durham
