have you ever seen chicago crime? no, i don’t mean getting mugged, jacked or otherwise ganked while there…i mean the open source crime reports database that’s been put together at chicagocrime.com ? this is the most impressive consummate framework for putting criminal data back where it belongs, in the hands of the taxpayers who made it possible to gather in the first place (and without whom there would in fact be no victims to study and model! duh…)…interactive journalism at its very best, earning a very well deserved nomination for a batten award..

you can go to this site and drill down by police beat, use maps to browse different ‘hoods, look up specific addresses, sort by zip codes and so on…and of course, you can search and sort by crime type (will it be: “aggravated battery: hands, feet, fist” today, or a more casual, “$300 and under financial identity theft”?…just not sure)

my question: who else is doing this - and why isn’t every damned city in the country doing this? (that’s two questions, i know, just roll with it)…the site uses “crime data obtained from the CPD’s Citizen ICAM Web site, which is a publicly available database of reported crime (chicago area only).” (a site that is constantly down!..sorry if that link dies on you.. try this link to read the overview, there’s also a link there to icam)…but other cities have got the same data repositories, so would somebody explain to me, please, why there isn’t a national version of this tool - the same type of thing that folks use to look up sex offenders, but for all crime, for all users, 24×7x365?

any big search engine player wanna step up to this challenge? it sure means a shitload more to me than just more cool pictures of the planet…

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