No matter where you live, the crime profile shifts over a 24 hour period, but it’s probably most noticeable in large urban areas. What’s perfectly safe near where I live at 10am is actually a crime hot spot at 10pm – this is true for a lot of transport junctions at London. (There’s also a shift in victim profile over time – lots of muggings in the 3pm to 4pm time slot when young kids are liberated of their mobile phones by bigger, meaner kids).
An independent group of developers are using San Francisco bay area crime data to show this difference and to add significant value to this area’s open crime data. Through a site called San Francisco CrimeSpotting (although the picture above is Oakland).
This is an alternative site to the official San Francisco Crime Watch maps and isn’t associated with the local law enforcement agencies. But it uses the same data because the data is open. And this creates an environment in which any developer can create other visualisations or applications with the same data. It pushes development further or addresses different needs without costing the local authorities anything. Open data is not an exhaustible or dividable resource, so a whole range of projects can spring up from them. In this case the purpose of functionality is similar, but the independent site offers some really interesting additional functionality – such as presenting the data across slices of time – which makes the data more useful to both citizens and the police.
(via Sotiris Koussouris)
Ingrid Koehler