Can You Do This for Your Town?
I’m sure there’s a lot of times my posts seem a little too much attuned to following trucks around to save businesses money. I do like to show some of the lesser known and intuitive uses of GPS. Here’s an interesting interactive crime map for Chicago that’s well worth a look,
I pointed you to an already opened example of a search for crimes by zip code. If you’re not familiar with Google Maps, note that you can pan the map to different areas by just clicking and dragging and move and zoom it with the clickable controls in the upper left corner. The information can be displayed as a map, as a satellite image or a hybrid with the streets overlaid on the imagery.
Go to the home page and note the number of options and the flexibility available … this tool is ideal for researching areas to live, schools to consider or even, as it ought to be, strategic planning of policing.
A notable and perhaps sad fact is that this is not a service off or in any way connected with the Chicago police. I’m sure the police department has expensive, very difficult to use ESRI crime mapping software - most big cities do.
Wonderful in its own right, but too expensive and too difficult for mere ordinary citizens to use. When the final reckoning comes in, just who does deserve this information .. perhaps that ordinary citizen?
A lot of creditable work has gone into this site, but the most amazing part is that it’s free for public use and it works so well. If your town or county hasn’t gotten started with a publicly accessible crime reporting system, this is indeed a good place to point the leaders in law enforcement .. before they get trapped into a system that will wind up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and won’t serve the public as well as the police.
Lest you think I’ve forgotten my roots, do realize that plotting the data of police cars on patrol .. live as it happens or after the fact for analysis would be trivially easy to add to this application .. it’s just another layer.
Hats off to the folks in Chicago this is a great use of GPS, GIS, imagery and Google.
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