Faneuil Media

Yesterday we launched a project we’re very excited about. It’s called Crime Tracker, it’s published on KCRA 3 in Sacramento and you can see it here.

Crime Tracker makes Sacramento’s public crime data super-easy to access. Enter your address and you find out what’s going on in your neighborhood. Easy as that.

The cool thing about this package, and data-intensive packages like it, is the level of relevance. TV stations run stories about crime all the time. But the incidents are usually in somebody else’s neighborhood. The stories that make you sit up straight and listen are the ones that happen in your neighborhood. Print and broadcast journalists can’t provide that kind of direct relevance to everybody. We can, and that’s what we’ve focused on here.

We studied lots of other crime maps as we built Crime Tracker. Among other journalists, Adrian Holovaty’s groundbreaking Chicagocrime.org is by far our favorite.

We also studied crime mapping in the academic and law enforcement communities, although the purpose of their maps is different. They map to analyze crime; we map to make to crime data accessible.

We’re particularly excited about two Crime Tracker features:

• Radius Search — The search in the upper right corner returns crimes within a set radius of the point you enter. We were going to divide the data up into police beats or districts, but KCRA suggested this, and we think it’s more intuitive.
• Embed Function — Using the code in the lower right corner of the page, anybody can publish specific pages within Crime Tracker on their site. Our hope is that this function allows people to drill down, examine and discuss the situation in specific neighborhoods.

So, give Crime Tracker a try and let us know what you think.