Online crime maps making it easier for public to spot trends, judge their own risk

Source: Pioneer Press, St.存倉 Paul, Minn.Sept. 07--Thanks to the Internet, it's possible for anyone to get an instant online map pinpointing directions to the nearest McRib sandwich, gender-neutral bathroom or Superfund site.And increasingly, it's a way to find crime.Maps have been used to analyze crime patterns since the early 1800s, and computerized versions have been around for decades. But only in the last few years have mashups combining public crime data and applications like Google Maps made crime maps available to the masses.Now interactive, neighborhood-level, Internet crime maps are being created by everyone from old-fashioned newspapers to all-digital news organizations to online entrepreneurs.The Pioneer Press is one of the latest to join in. We launchedan online interactive map of reported crimes in St. Paul on our website last month.And now we're wondering what kind of impact it might have on users and whether it will change people's behavior or perception of crime.If other crime maps are an example, we should expect it to be popular.When the United Kingdom put a crime map online in 2011 that mapped crime for every street in England and Wales, it got up to 18 million hits an hour, crashing the website. (The population of England and Wales was 56.1 million in 2011.)"When it launched, it was by far the most popular page of the day," said Ashley Luthern, public safety reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, of her paper's interactive Milwaukee crime incident map, which rolled out in April.Colin Drane, founder of the SpotCrime.com website, said his nationwide crime-mapping site gets the most visits in the country, with 1 million unique visitors and 8 million email alerts a month."I think there's a huge appetite for this," said Elizabeth Groff, a criminal justice professor at Temple University who has studied crime maps.Crime-map advocates say the maps give citizens greater power to hold police accountable. For example, if police claim that a robbery was an isolated incident in a particular neighborhood, it should be reflected in the mapped data.And the crime-incident maps may give people a more realistic picture of their risk of being a victim than just reading about the most serious crimes that get newspaper headlines and lead the evening news.Until now, most crimes that occur in a big city have gone unreported by the media. Most metro newspapers won't do a story about each garage burglary or purse snatching. But online crime maps have the potential to tell you where every one of those incidents occurred, and if one happened on your block."The downspout theft or the burglary or the robbery that happened around the corner to me is personal to me," said Drane, whose describes his free crime-map websites as a form of news media, funded through advertising. "It allows people to make informed decisions."One of those decisions is: Do I want to live here? said David Eads, news application developer for the Chicago Tribune. He said he thinks the primary users of his newspaper's online maps of crime in Chicago are people trying to decide whether to move or buy a home in an unfamiliar neighborhood."Once you live somewhere, you kind of know," he said.Eads also said that in some of the city's worst neighborhoods, residents used the paper's homicide map to decide which corners to avoid."Some people see these maps and are scared," he said. But he noted that the paper's map has shown that some neighborhoods viewed as high-crime areas actually are more average when adjusted for population levels."We want to challenge some of the narratives that sensationalize crime," Eads said. "It will hopefully give people a more honest assessment of risk."St. Paul-based real estate agent Steven Rosnow said the new availability of online crime maps is probably a good thing as long as the information is accurate.Rosnow said that without accurate information, homebuyers might have to make decisions based on guesswork about whether a neighborhood is "good" or "bad."He said real estate agents today are train迷你倉d not to tell buyers if a neighborhood is unsafe because it can be interpreted as a form of redlining. Instead, Rosnow tells buyers they need to do their own research.Rosnow also said large areas of the city like the East Side can develop a reputation as having a problem with crime when in reality individual neighborhoods in that area are just fine. He said a good crime map could help show that objectively.Critics of crime maps have worried that mapping the data will further stigmatize high-crime areas, driving down property values.But Rosnow said he doesn't think maps that show where crime is really high will hurt property values."If it's extreme, people are already going to know that," he said."Ooh. Shots fired. We were just looking at that in the police blotter," said Sarah Murphy, a Payne-Phalen area resident who recently looked at the Pioneer Press crime map.She said she reads the police-blotter items in the community paper."I guess I'm the kind of person who thinks knowledge is beneficial," she said."I think it does help to see exactly what it is," she said, looking at the paper's crime map. "It definitely makes you think: 'Whoa, what's that one? I definitely wouldn't want to live there.' ""In some cases it's going to make people feel more safe. In some cases, it might make people feel less safe," said Greg Borowski, assistant managing editor for projects and investigations for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But he said that with a good crime map, "you have some empirical information.""Looking at crime data and trends can help fit specific incidents into a broader context, and can help challenge preconceptions people may have about certain areas of the cities," said Kaeti Hinck, director of new technology at MinnPost.com, which just launched a Minneapolis crime map. "The more transparent information we have about crime in our cities, the more we are empowered as citizens to address those issues and ask for more from our public officials."A 2005 study showed that residents who viewed crime maps -- especially maps that pinpointed crime locations -- reported less fear of crime than when they viewed just a table that listed the crime incidents. The study also showed that maps portraying crime didn't seem to stigmatize high-crime areas, and respondents given maps were more likely to recommend someone move into an area than those just given a list of crimes.Groff, of Temple University, who helped write the study, said the maps that pinpoint crime locations may make people less worried because "you see it's very discrete, it's concentrated in certain places."In contrast, a long list of crimes, or even a map shading in whole neighborhoods by crime levels, can make it seem as if crime is everywhere.Another concern is whether address-level-accurate maps might harm crime victims."For many crime victims, victimization is a private and sometimes shameful thing that they don't want to share with the public," said a 2012 study on online crime-mapping companies done for the National Institute of Justice. "Does providing highly accurate maps add an aspect of re-victimization?"But Drane, of SpotCrime.com, said crime maps can be "anonymized," locating crimes at a block level, so that privacy issues aren't a concern."Maps are really powerful, and people situate themselves on maps," Eads said. But he cautioned that crime maps and crime data at best give an incomplete picture of danger and personal risk. For one thing, the incidents listed on a map may not reflect actual crime levels as much as enforcement efforts by police.Murphy also said many residents in her Payne-Phalen neighborhood want more information than can be provided on a typical crime map -- like what happened after the crime was reported."What they're really wanting is follow-up," Murphy said.Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560. Follow him at twitter.com/RRChin.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.) 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