Sunday, December 16, 2007

Daily Dallas crime reports available by email this week

By Avi Adelman of Barking Dogs

Daily Crime Report.

DALLAS — Please allow Barking Dogs (BD) to stand on his crimewatch soapbox and talk about a subject close to all of us...

Crime in our neighborhoods. Mine, yours, your parents, your kids' school.

Do you know there are nearly 500 Dallas Police Incident Reports filed every day?

Would you be shocked to know that there are at least five incidents in an average neighborhood every day???

Did you know that someone entered a home on the 5900 block of Prospect last Sunday morning and took some personal property??

Did you know that someone went into a home on the same block on Saturday morning and stole something off the coffee table??

Are you seeing a trend here?

There are really two issues here: The crimes themselves, and the fact that until recently, getting this important information on a timely basis was either difficult but not impossible.

The BelmontNA - like many neighborhood associations - has been posting monthly neighborhood crime summaries for years. BelmontNA also has a database of crimes committed in (four) prior years, searchable by address, street, name, etc.

For about two years, BD has been working on unique concept: Can we publish Dallas Police (or for that matter, any other city) incident reports every day?

No waiting for the monthly summaries from the Dallas Police Department, giving you plenty of time to see trends on your street (especially if you live on Prospect Avenue.).

In Chicago, one mugging victim has a Google-maps driven website showing crimes committed in the past few months (ChicagoCrime.org).

Last week, The Dallas Apartment Association opened a $100 per year subscription-based website presenting incidents by ZIP code.

You can visit the DPD's Public Access site, but do you have time to put in all the street names you want to research or try to remember what Beat or Sector you live in? Do you have the time - let alone can you remember - to go check the site every day? It's a great site but you have to want to go there and do the research.

Now that the DPD has made their Incident Report database available to the public, BD and others have figured out how to send you this information - for just your neighborhood, your DPD sector, or your DPD division - by email every morning.

This concept - DailyCrimeReport.com - goes live for the whole city this week. The current site is Version 1 - there's lots of tweaking and fixes yet to be made (and we gotta fix that yellow!). Version 2 will be cooler and have lots of really cool features and widgets (at least, that's what my developer says).

Every morning (before 8 am we hope), you will receieve an email with a list of incident reports filed up to midnight the previous day, plus two days prior to that.

You will also get a PDF file of the same information (one or two pages) that you can print and read at your desk over a cup of coffee.

The information is only available by email. The links to nearly 50 pages sorted by Divisions and Sectors will not be publicly posted in this version.

The information will not be based on wide ranging ZIP codes, but on DPD beats and reporting areas. That means your neighborhood and street names you recognize.

The best part: There will be no charge for this service. Zip, nada, free, hoof-shee, effes!

The site has been beta-testing for BelmontNA members for about a week. One member told BD she printed the list of home burglary locations so she could drive to them. She wanted to see if there was something they did wrong to make them vulnerable, so she would not make the same mistake at her home.

A small group of conspirators - neighborhood folks and civic-minded developers and business people (who prefer to remain nameless right now) are backing this site with their time, their support and their ideas. This is gonna be so awesome!

And yes, there are advertising opportunities for those who want to reach this unique audience. Can we say 100,000 potential subscribers???

BarkingDogs.org covers the Lower Greenville Avenue area.

Editor's note: There's lots of activity in this space right now. There was the recent announcement of Crime Reports Live, a paid site. And we'll be integrating this same data on PegNews neighborhood pages (also for free) after the first of the year.

See more stories in:

• Crime

Comments

chasd00 Anonymous

Absolutely awesome. Getting the crime stats is an aggravating process this is going to be great.

One request, please email the reports in a spreadsheet (.csv or .xls). Us programmers would really appreciate it :) I can't wait to integrate this data into the D.E.E.P. website.

I don't always agree with Barking Dogs but many thanks to you guys for this.

7 months, 1 week ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

Mike Orren Staff

Yet another entrant, found via a Google ad on our site:

http://www.crimereports.com/map?searc...

Not locally owned and operated, but frankly the best of the bunch so far in terms of functionality. Data not as fresh though. And the registered sex offender data is really available, including pictures -- we've made the decision not to make that information available on our site because of the flaws in the reporting system.

Our version is still coming and will integrate with the neighborhood maps.

7 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

Mike Orren Staff

Nothing on the DPD site yet, but looks like they're only caught up to 2 AM as of right now...

Nothing on the other news sites. Will keep an eye out...

7 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )