crime

The Grand Rapids Police Department has just launched a new Crime Map. It is very well done, easy to use, and has more detailed and current information than I could ever hope to use in my own map. And, unlike their previous crime map, it doesn’t crash my browser when I try to use it.

I guess my work here is done.

Since I launched my map, back in 2005, I have pulled all of the incidents therein from the local news. News being what it is, only the incidents which were newsworthy made it into my map – mostly violent crime. Happenings which were out of the ordinary. As the data increased over the years it became obvious that, while it is good to know where these incidents tend to occur, it really isn’t all that useful in day-to-day life. Simply put, if something makes it into the news, it is because it is something which doesn’t happen very often.

Consider: I live in a neighborhood for years. One day one of my neighbors goes crazy and shoots his wife. For the next twenty years, nothing news-worthy happens on my street. Yet, because of that one incident, which was very much an outlier event, now my block has the reputation of being the kind of place where people get shot. Adding this incident to a map provides inaccurate information in two ways:

1. It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever repeat that crime on this block again, and

2. This was not a natural consequence of living in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

It is not the newsworthy crimes which define the livability and safety of a neighborhood – it is the mundane, happens-to-everyone incidents, like getting the radio stolen from your car, graffiti, drunken fights during a college party, drug deals, or getting mugged. The incidents which, in a city, tend to become indistinguishable from the background noise until it happens to you.

I created my map as a response to having the radio stolen from my car twice, in two different neighborhoods, two years apart. Yet incidents like that never make the local news. Which neighborhood would you rather live in – the one where someone was one killed in a fit of domestic rage, or the one where people get bikes stolen from their back yards on a weekly basis? The first incident is essentially a Black Swan, and could happen anywhere; from the worst ghetto to the most exclusive gated community. The second tends to happen where people are less involved and less invested in their property and community.

So I am going to stop updating my map. I will leave it where it is, along with the story behind it, and my contact information. I am in the process of upgrading the simple content management system behind the map, and will continue to do so until I decide I have done it right, or until someone releases a software package which does everything my system does, only better.

To all of you who have used my map for the past four years, thank you for your kind comments and suggestions. I am happy that I was able to provide this service for so long.

Once again, the new Grand Rapids Police Department Crime Map can be found at http://www.crimemapping.com/map/mi/grandrapids.

A few days ago a crime mapping article I wrote for the People Design blog went live. It pulls together thoughts I have had about this whole mapping thing, and some input from some other people who are involved in this sort of thing.

On Monday I came across a link to a presentation Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 conference last week (transcript of the speech) (video of the speech). In it he talks about the idea of a “cognitive surplus”, and what that could mean for the world in the upcoming years. The idea, brutally simplified, is that as we cease indulging in passive entertainment and begin involving ourselves more and more in interactive pursuits, the amount of available brain-power in the world will increase dramatically. Not that the brains haven’t always been there; they have been turned down to a flicker by being pure consumers of ideas rather than producers.

Shirky brought up the common comment about people who do things like create the Wikipedia: “Where do they find the time?” Simple. They are actively exercising their imaginations, rather than passively absorbing someone else’s output.

The comments and compliments my co-workers offered me about the crime map, combined with the Shirky talk, got me to thinking. The crime map was a simple project. Other than gathering the crime data, it really represented about five hours of work. An afternoon. The length of two of the Matrix movies. If everyone who sat through the Matrix movies more than once, decided instead to exercise their imaginations for that time instead, how many more wonderful things would there be in the world?

I just added a new entry to the Crime Map – an Armed Assault. Some dude got shot down on the SouthWest side. I also changed the status of one of the crimes. This is the first time I have needed to do such a thing, and it upset me a little. There was a kid got beat up outside of a bar back on the 10th of this month. Well, a few days ago, he died of his injuries. So now the Crime Map has its first homicide of the year. My sympathies go out to the family of Jonathan Krystiniak.

This bothered me more than it might have, because of the similarities to an incident that nearly took the life of a good friend. Long time readers of this blog may remember this particularly stressful month, back in 2004.

I have to say that WOOD TV is doing a very good job of covering the Krystiniak story. Of the few local news websites that actually cover local news, theirs is the only one where information is easily accessible, and regularly archived.

Sigh.

In other news, I have begun the process of re-designing and upgrading this website. Hopefully things will go smoothly and (for readers) invisibly, but there is the possibility that es.o could be down for a little while. I am going to upgrade the blogging software – TextPattern – to the newest build, which is 4.something. I am currently using 1.something. The new design should be ready to go in a few more weeks. I have some other things to get off my plate before I can attend to my own desires.

[EDIT: 6:15pm]
Turns out that I just had to upgrade last night’s shooting to a homicide. So now we are up to two murders in Grand Rapids in the month of January, 2008. January 2007 also had 2 murders. With four days left in the month we still have a chance to beat that record!