The new crime mapping tool being sponsored by/run by EMU and the EMU’s Institute for Geospatial Research (who news we had such a thing?) is pretty cool and has been getting a lot of press in the local and regional media. Here’s a link to the EMU press release, and here’s a link to the mapping tool itself.
It is a pretty cool and handy/easy to use tool. I do wish it would also include crime states for the townships and Ann Arbor too, especially since the city of Ypsilanti is itself is pretty small and completely surrounded by these places, and also because so many EMU stake-holders live in Ann Arbor. But I also agree with this from the Freep.com editorial “Online crime stats may benefit cities:”
Eastern Michigan University and the city of Ypsilanti are starting an online crime mapping system that Detroit and other cities should consider — but any such system would be only as good as the statistics police provide.
Users can view crimes committed, or at least reported, in the last 60 days, broken down into categories like arson, assault, auto theft, murder and robbery. The problem, as recent stories in the Free Press show, is that police statistics are often unreliable. In Detroit, for example, many crimes don’t get reported or investigated. There’s even a big dispute over how many homicides were committed in the city last year.
In other words, prior to the various fines against EMU that came from the investigations of the way DPS and others handled the Dickenson murder, there would have been a lot of data missing from these maps. On the other hand, as the Freep editorial also says, this is the kind of tool that helps the public easily see crime statistics, which might encourage those folks to do a better job of reporting crime.
I, personally, was a little puzzled by the police department’s decision to create a crime map in this way. I mean, using students was probably a cheap way to do it, but overall the map sucks. You may be able to go back 60 days, but you can only see two crimes at a time on the map.
My parents live in Cleveland, and they have this great thing called CrimeReports.com (apparently, they’re all over the country) that has way more functionality and you can look back much further. Plus it has this cool “analytics” tab where tou can actually see crime trend over time and other pretty cool stuff.
I’m just saying that, sure, the police have given us a crime map, but it looks like a half-hearted effort and a token gesture rather than a real desire to share information with the public and keep them informed.
The map is great tool.
Richard, Are you planning on fighting crime in your spare time? How much information do you need? Between the Newspapers in the area covering any crimes of importance, the timely warnings the EMU police department sends out, the Cleary crimes that are kept in the daily log on the DPS website and now the crime map I feel the University community is more than adequately informed.
Are there better maps out there, sure. But this map is just fine, plus with all the previous mentioned means of following crime on campus and in Ypsilanti near campus how can anything be considered a “token” gesture.
Would you like every resident of Ypsilanti and EMU be issued a police radio so they can follow the crime in the city as they occur, maybe you can show up and make some citizen arrests.
Next. The Police State!