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.
