RICHMOND, Calif. — After years of offering patchy, ill-maintained crime data on its Web site, the Richmond Police Department has launched a mapping tool that provides daily updates about local crime.
The CrimeView program, available at http://www.richmondpd.net, allows users to search a database of reported crimes by date, type and location and can both list and map them.
The Web site used to offer tables of reported crimes in different neighborhoods by month, but it almost never updated them. The new tool automatically updates about 5 a.m. daily, pulling information directly from new entries in the department's records management system.
"I believe that people become more powerful when they know what is going on," police Chief Chris Magnus said. "This will make us more accountable. People can see the crime for themselves, and if we're not getting the job done, more are going to say, 'Jeez, police department, what are you doing out there?'"
The program is a less powerful version of an internal tool that Magnus hopes will become widely used by neighborhood beat officers to identify crime patterns and trends at the block level.
Since joining the department in 2006, Magnus has promoted COMPSTAT, a policing strategy that relies heavily on geographic crime data to better inform patrol strategies and drive law enforcement projects.
The strategy cannot work without detailed, daily data.
While police managers have worked with CrimeView since the beginning stages of its development last year, it remained too bug-ridden to be of much use until recently.
Bugs persist, Sgt. Manjit Sappal said, but it works well enough to keep residents informed about most crimes in their neighborhoods.
"We've been working with it (internally) since last July. Everyone seems to like it, but they understand its limitations," said Sappal, who leads the effort to customize the program for Richmond. "The feedback has been pretty good so far."
The public version comes with significant limits. It can only search for crimes reported within the past 90 days, and it does not provide information about most sex crimes. It also does not provide incident addresses, only block numbers.
As a result, the mapping program puts all incidents on a given block in the middle of the block. The program maps crimes around a submitted address, or by neighborhood or police beat, or around public spaces such as parks, schools and transit stations.
The program also offers a list format that includes the date, time, block number and type of offense for each incident.
The Contra Costa Sheriff's Office uses similar mapping software on that agency's Web site, http://www.cocosheriff.org, but it provides only monthly snapshots of crime in communities it serves, and no incident details.
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