Weapon of choice

A few more agencies have joined the ranks of customers of the Omega Group that are offering their residents crimemapping.com as a means of keeping track of crime in their jurisdiction. I think its a decidedly good thing when citizens understand what’s going on in their own community, and realize that the police are dealing with more than the two or three items that happened to make the news on any given day.

The Peoria, Illinois Police Department is one of the recent additions at crimemapping.com. They have great data, and I particularly like the fact that (like Lincoln) Peoria includes short narrative comments for the crimes they map. I think these comments are helpful to understanding the context of crime.

For example, I received a Crime Alert last week pertaining to a crime right around the corner from my house. I’ve subscribed to a buffer of two-tenths of a mile from my address. I probably would not have known about it otherwise, due to the volume of crime we deal with in Lincoln. The comments in the Crime Alert indicated that an unlocked pickup had been entered, and some coins taken from the console. That’s a much different picture than the map alone, had the crime icon been labeled without the comments.

Interestingly, when I visited Peoria and clicked on my very first offense in crimemapping.com, it was this one (click image to enlarge):

I will add the egg McMuffin to my list of odd assault weapons.

By the way, I downloaded the Apple Safari (public beta 4) browser last week. There are definately some performance differences between browsers. I’ve tried Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE 8, but Safari is now my weapon of choice for crimemapping.com.