Comments on: MPD No Longer Providing Daily Crime Summaries

By: Vox Populi » Mean streets of Georgetown: University-area crime map

Vox Populi » Mean streets of Georgetown: University-area crime map — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:00:50 +0000

[...] already complained about everybody else’s crime map, and pending the loss of MPD email alerts, Vox went ahead and made its own crime map for the Georgetown University [...]

By: DC Gov Drops Daily Crime E-mail, Users Unhappy with alternative, a Map « The GeoUpdate

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:03:28 +0000

[...] search near an address, searching on a specific crime, etc. GIS may love it but some, like the Georgetown Metropolitan Blog (GMT) finds it wanting compared to the sleek text listing. (Full review from the blog including [...]

By: Our Morning Roundup: Safeway Troubles - City Desk - Washington City Paper

Our Morning Roundup: Safeway Troubles - City Desk - Washington City Paper — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:45:51 +0000

[...] Georgetown Metropolitan notes that the D.C. Police Department has dropped its daily crime summaries from at least one listserv: “Members of the MPD2d listserv may have noticed that they haven’t received a daily summary [...]

By: Colin

Colin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:27:21 +0000

my company, SpotCrime, has been providing email alert summaries based on address location for the last year. We pull the DC data regularly. There is also an RSS feed and a Twitter feed.

If that’s not enough, we’ve got a Facebook app and an iPhone optimized page. And, we are mapping crimes on Georgetown Universities campus through our sister site UCrime.com.

We are always looking for feedback.

By: Kevin Donovan

Kevin Donovan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:06:01 +0000

It would seem that this isn’t the type of thing D.C.’s CTO (great profile here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010401235.html) would support. Perhaps you should reach out to him.

By: Jay Reeder

Jay Reeder — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:50:37 +0000

I can see why MPD wanted to stop generating the daily reports: it was obvious that the reports were tediously hand-compiled by a rotating case of patrol officers. Standardization and quality control were non-existent.

But MPD ignored a better solution to this problem: they can just generate automated daily reports using the same database that drives the crime map. Their database guy (they do have one, right?) should be able to gin-up the appropriate script in a couple minutes.

Heck, the data files can be downloaded from the crimemap.dc.gov by the general public. I may just write a script to autopost to MPD-2D myself.