Good post by Mike Migurski as a follow-up to the relaunch of Oakland Crime Spotting. The thing that I caught out of it was that he was willing to listen to the way people in city government and in the neighborhoods think about crime geographically, even if it meant adopting a mode of thinking that he was personally inclined to disagree with.
A large number of our users asked for these, though truthfully it wasn’t something I expected. I’ve been historically critical of the forms-first approach that CrimeView Community takes ("Easy wizard interface"),
eschewing it in favor of a maps-first approach. Changing standards of
cheapness are a recent interest of mine, and it’s cheaper to show everything.***
The Police department is organized into beats, and this turns out to be
the right way to interface with them if you’re a concerned, active
citizen. Each beat has a consistent set of officers and public contact information. Oakland CTO Bob Glaze told me the beat designations haven’t changed in decades. Clearly, maps and data for individual beats were going to be necessary.
Good stuff.