Ideas

I think this is a great idea. You might need some moderation to keep the spam down. I can see businesses posting things like "it's a crime how low our prices are" and people putting up hot-or-not style pictures just because they can.

Hi PeteC
I see one problem: the website is global, the crime reported is local.
Success,
Tommy

Micco the information submitted is not for public viewing or use. It's for the police and city council to better direct their efforts.

Each city could buy the code and design to use on their site or a new site.
Could even have some sort of map feature to help pin point the problem areas.
Crime reporters select the type of crime/activity which gets color coded on the map, they also populate time and brief description maybe even have a pictures upload section.

interestin but complicated! the whole local directory?

I think if the content is just for police/city use, you wouldn't get much traffic. I don't think I'd bother to post images of petty crimes if they just disappeared into a closed site and I had no feedback on whether they'd even been viewed, much less addressed.

I think to really attract users and motivate submission, you'd need the content to be public, geo-tagged, and moderated. If cities knew that all the little petty crimes were going to be online, they'd be motivated to do something about them.

micco you made some good points and I agree with you.
Perhaps the information should be public, less of a chance of the same thing being reported over and over again, plus more of a chance of the city doing something about it.

Millions tuned into baitcar.com a Vancouver website about auto theft.
It's made around 20% difference in lowering auto thefts in the Vancouver area.

Sounds like a good idea.

I think there would be people who would abuse it by lying & filing malicious reports, but if enough people participated in the site, then the liars would be drowned out by the truth-tellers.

It would be wonderful to be able to report the license number of every unkind driver one meets during the course of an average day. Or at least the ones who are breaking the law and irritating me at the same time ;-)

Crime stoppers in secret, they have no idea who phones, where I am

Gods_Light you are right, as far as I know, CrimeStoppers doesn't ask for your identity, that's one of their biggest characteristics. I wonder if this site could be different. CrimeStoppers seems to have a lot of different types of local web presences. The one in Calgary does appear to accept tips online, but if you look at crimestoppers.com you get the one for Washington State, which looks very different and does not take tips online.

In addition to accepting tips online, it would be nice if the various incidents reported could be shown on the site, if there would be a way of doing that without putting any of the witnesses in danger.

For example, there could be a whole section just asking for witnesses to various incidents, like car accidents or vandalism.

Your heart is in the right place, but I doubt this will be anymore successful than CrimeStoppers.
One thing you could do is create a crime mapping website for the whole country. Many of these maps exist for highly populated cities, but not for smaller ones.

Fitzpatrick, to carry on from your idea, the police have their own systems for analysing crime stats, including geographically.

However I don't think it's information that the public has ready access to - possibly because nobody is really asking for it? Or maybe there are crime maps out there and I just don't know about them.

Anyway, I think mapping crime by both police and public would be good. There could be colour or symbol codes to indicate whether the report came from police or public, and perhaps to indicate the nature of the crime.

I bet this exists within police world but I am not so sure there is a retail version - good take on PeteC's original idea.

It would be another layer on Google Earth type of thing.

^Yep! You and I are thinking along the same lines. I think the best way to make money off of that idea would be to have a free website that was ad-supported.

I really like all the feed back on this idea.
Believe it or not I think crimestoppers does record your call.
I do know that if you ever call the police station (not 911) they are recording your call.

The form
https://www.tipsubmi...ps.aspx?AgencyID=183
looks like a nightmare and people will not go there to submit a PETTY crime like a drunk harassing people. Because "he will be long gone" and from my understanding that the type of thing crimestoppers website could careless about. If we had a system to report smaller things maybe the sheer number would cause the city/police to do something.
I guess I'm trying to come up with a proactive solution to mark the area as a hotspot before a real crime is committed.

Good to see an idea for the betterment of the society.... I would suggest even putting up photos of missing people, most wanted etc.. on the site, so that people browsing could report if they see them......

Nice 1..could we also like have it categorized as per areas? otherwise its difficult to relate local areas with the crimes mentioned elsewhere.

Ha ha ha ha ha... you trust "people"...

Heavy editing will be needed... Example: I report you being drunk robbing my house.

How can you prove it correct or incorrect? Plus if it really takes of, people can use it in many political ways... revenge too. Real estate manipulation... Oh the possibilities are endless.

For this to be real effective, it needs to be on the micro/neghborhood level with registered and trusted users/sources responsible for their own submissions.

Said that... the idea just got less attractive

Local Police just created this idea.

http://metronews.ca/...local.aspx?id=110694

Paper says it's for petty crimes without a suspect so that police can build a database of problem hotspots in the city.

(They do require your contact info for follow-up)

Argh... there's a WIRED article (I'm sure it was WIRED) where someone devised a public-entry tracking system like this. So maybe its the same system now being officially deployed.

Anyhoo while searching for that article here's some potentially useful tangential articles...

the way to predict lawlessness is to identify and track leading indicators
http://www.wired.com...hive/11.09/view.html

Orion, a software program for hunting serial criminals. Silence of the Lambs type location analysis... NOT minor crime tracking. So interesting but a possible future feature, not related to the core task.
http://www.wired.com...hive/5.02/scans.html

Here's a link to the Calgary service. This is a live, actual service so don't anyone pollute it with bogus data.
http://www.gov.calga...nline-reporting.html

My Idea is eight months before the Calgary Service launched their site.

Plus with my idea you do not need to submit details about yourself.

When it comes to local graffiti I don't think the cops even care so people and businesses never report it, they just paint over it.

I think a database system where at the end of the year they would have to show results and explain why they let some crimes go uninvestigated would be beneficial.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crimereports