No, no, no, no. This is worse than watching the news.

alyssa

Having looked at San Jose, California and seen a blanket of guns with what must have been a map in the background (Who knows? All you could see were guns.). I have to agree with snowmentality. Something other than a gun for simple assault would be nice. Maybe a fist?

Helzerman

I had an idea like this as well, reminds me of Sim City 4 with all the popups for crimes when you view the crime map.

Internet-TV

I like how the "assault" icon is a gun. That gives a really misleading impression about the number of gun crimes. I saw a gun icon in my neighborhood and freaked out until I read that the listing said "Simple assault." One guy punching another guy =/= one guy pulling a gun on another guy.

snowmentality

It doesn't seem that the site covers the New England area very well--just Boston; Lewiston, ME; & New Haven, CT. That's not particularly useful for the rest of us.

crazyasitsounds

Oops, meant to post a link: [www2.seattle.gov]

rsweet2

There is an online real-time 911 response tool thingo where I live (Seattle WA). It looks like it is just for fire/aid responses though. It would be interesting to see a GMap mashup with that. Even better would be having it in google maps on your phone + a GPS sensor.

If it showed police responses, it would be kinda like GTA on your phone... Looks like that shooting report is just down the block from me, time to leave. Of course this could also help any criminals know that it is time to leave.

rsweet2

Could I make a suggestion, Lifehacker editors?

It's really bothersome to read all the way through a post only to discover that it doesn't apply to non-Americans. Could you please put a tag or something high up on USA-only articles, like "USA-only" or something? Also it would be cool to put the author and date up the top of the article, not (illogically) down the bottom.

kiwinerdgrrl

Hey, this isn't like that random sex offender map generator they posted a while back, is it?

Johnay

@jarhead: Maybe there's been no crime in 3 days! :-)

Harlan

Yes!
I can Get all my Murder Death Kill news in one spot now.

Fabulous.

xlerate

I looked up a shooting where I used to live and it didn't even show up. The rest were petty car stereo theft and drunk college kids.

JerryA

Wow there was a murder by my apartment last month. Other then that it seems half of the crimes are just drunken college kids.

lilkeith7

248 crimes in Chicago over one year? I think they might be missing a few...

chipotlehero

This is of very limited value.

Here in the SF area I checked out 4 nearby cities. For Menlo Park (the city closest to me that they list) they had 0 reports.

Both Los Gatos and Palo Alto had 300 records (exactly - seems fishy). Both seem to have reports sent from the police department and is fairly comprehensive.

San Francisco had 50 reports (1/6 the number of reports for the much-smaller Palo Alto and Los Gatos). Their data seemed to be drawn from news reports. Since news reports are highly edited by the newspaper, it's not a true representation of the crime trends. For SF, there are almost no reports in the "high crime" areas. Newspapers don't report most of the crime in the high-crime areas because it's not "news".

jcdill

Nice idea, but not very accurate. First it only has a few major cities and even at that it only showed 14 crimes in Seattle over a 1 year period. I think there were a "few" more than that.

kingtermite

Is there a Canadian equivalent to this site? I haven't been able to find one.

fishlips20

Eh, I don't really find it overly useful. But I'm sure some people would...

ww2db.com

Hah, Stabbing right up the street from my house at my old Elementary school. Sweet. MS must be back in town.

Joseph

Wow, this is pretty darn cool. I don't really care if it's updated in 24 hours. Why would anyone? This is great for figuring out where to work, rent, park, walk, etc.

OX4

I love this line from the TechCrunch writeup:

"...so SpotCrime isn't useful for avoiding crimes in progress."

Now that would be something. "Before we walk any further, let me check SpotCrime to see if there are any muggings happening on the next block..."

Sadly, TechCrunch is probably just referring to traffic at a large crime scene, not a "minority report".

joelena

@MiddleGeek: In my neck of the woods, this site's source is the interactive map provided by our local police department.

jarhead

Checking my location, the last date of a reported crime is 3 days ago. So much for the 3-24 hours update time frame.

jarhead

I am not sure but it looks like the source is news stories. If you keep up with the news already this is not a huge new resource, but at least it is a way to review them all in one place.

MiddleGeek