Crime data is highly sought after information.
Everyone wants to know what crime is like in any given area. As a Realtor®, I'm asked about crime all the time in any given neighborhood. Since I'm not a crime expert, I refer them to the City Of San Antonio Police Department Crime Data website and from there they can sort through the various data and statistics to figure out what they like or don't like about a neighborhood.
Unfortunately, most police departments are too busy working on solving and stopping crime to be worried about clean user interfaces and aesthetics in their crime data. Enter CrimeReports.com. Using a familiar and simple interface, CrimeReports allows the user to enter the name of the city and bring up a Google Map with an overlay of crime data in that area. With easy to locate icons reporting various types of crime, users can quickly and easily see what's happening in a given area.
Putting Texas on the map.
San Antonio is (so far) not covered, but New Braunfels is (which as you can see is where I took my screen shot). I hope that San Antonio will join the ranks of other Texas cities and begin feeding their data to the site. Currently the covered cities in Texas are: Argyle, Azle, Bedford, Burleson, City Of Weatherford, Dallas, Decatur, Euless, Farmers Branch, Grapevine, Haltom City, Highland Village, Hurst, Jasper, Murphy, New Braunfels, North Richland Hills, Paris, Plano, Richland Hills, Roanoke, Rowlett, San Angelo, The Colony, University Park, Victoria, and Watagua.
The site also allows you to search through sex offender registries, combining both crime data and sex offender registration sites into one easy to access source.
Thanks to Jay Thompson for posting about this site on his blog, Phoenix Real Estate Guy. Even if you're not in Phoenix, his blog is a great source of information on real estate and I highly recommend him.
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Matt Stigliano, Realtor® | RE/MAX Access | (210) 646-HOME | www.RErockstar.com
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Matt - This looks like a cool site! I hope they add the Austin area soon. It looks like the vast majority of the covered cities are in the Dallas area for now.
Jason - It would be great if we could get Austin and San Antonio covered. It sure beats combing through the DPS and local police sites. I may see if I can't figure out who to forward this info to...city hall, my district council member, the police chief, the mayor? Perhaps all of the above.
For some reason, I thought I might find reports of violation of the after 10:00pm noise ordinances in your neighborhood...Something about screaming guitars!
Russell - Unless my neighbors don't like the sound of the clickity clack of my keyboard, they're probably safe.
Excellent information!
Everyone should have this bookmarked/ saved as a favorite.
Craig - I think this could benefit a lot of people if it went nationwide. I hope it does. I owe the "discovery" to Jay Thompson. He's smart like that.
Matt,
This is a great site which I can share with my clients.
Richard - I just wish it covered San Antonio so I could share it with mine! It might be one of my favorites since WalkScore.
Good info - sure would be nice to see SA.
Doug - I might just have to email the owners of CrimeReports.com and see how they go about getting new cities involved, because I do see a great potential for this. Since it's visual it will draw more people in as well and being able to get this information in an easy to read/see format would allow more people to access and make sense of police data and make informed decisions.