Web site pinpoints crime location
Published 10:55 pm Monday, February 4, 2008
The inspiration for Crime Reports.com came a decade ago when Greg Whisenant made the mistake of letting a stranger, who turned out to be a burglar, into his apartment building in Arlington, Va.
“Why can’t we have some kind of alert system that would tell me something like that?” he wondered.
Now he has created it. A new service on CrimeReports.com, launched last year and expanding nationwide, overlays police reports on maps, so people can view where arrests and other police calls have been made. Users can configure e-mail alerts to notify them of crimes in locations of interest within a day.
The free site relies mainly on police departments paying $100 or $200 a month, depending on their size, to have CrimeReports.com extract the information from their internal systems and publish it online. Whisenant’s company pledges to post no ads on the site.
About 40 law enforcement agencies have signed up. So far, the only Washington state city available on the site appears to be Bellevue.
CrimeReports.com lists only the block on which a crime occurred or was reported, not the actual address, so as to protect victims’ privacy.
Whisenant knows the site needs better user-friendliness. For example, clicking icons for police reports in San Jose, Calif., brings up such arcane notations as “Call Type: 242.”
