Each student in my Crime and Community seminar is responsible for tracking crime news coverage in an individual city and sharing their findings every week on a class blog. My goal is for students to become more critical readers of crime news, discover any common themes between cities, and identify variations in crime (and media accounts of crime) between cities.
Recently, the student covering Tucson discovered this very cool interactive crime map. It allows a reader to see where specific crimes are being reported over a day, week, or month. It also gives a good sense of comparative frequency of reported crimes. It's a nice teaching tool for anyone who wants show a visual account of reported crimes. And it's just plain interesting.
Washington, DC has a similar map: http://capstat.oca.dc.gov/mapping/
Posted by: Josh Blackman | October 13, 2010 at 11:20 AM
Philadelphia
http://cml.upenn.edu/crimebase/
Posted by: Jason | October 13, 2010 at 01:18 PM
St. Louis
http://www.slmpd.org/crime_mapping.html
The St. Louis site actually links to an external website - http://www.crimereports.com - which collects data from participating local agencies. The crime reports site also supplies national sex offender data and apparently also has an iphone app.
Posted by: Jenny | October 13, 2010 at 07:25 PM