Under the leadership of Chief Charlie Beck, the LAPD is working to use all the tools currently available in order to better share information about crime as soon as possible after it happens. According to the LAPD website, being informed about crime in your community is the first step in preventing future occurrences.
The LAPD is working in partnership with The Omega Group, the industry-leading developer of innovative Geographic Information Systems software designed to assist public agencies with their daily data driven decisions. The LAPD is feeding crime data to the Omega Group to ensure that each crime is reported accurately on the crime mapping site. The records themselves are also put through an exclusive data scrubbing process that works to locate each crime incident geographically, to a hundred block.
The data is very specific and helps to illuminate crime trends. Looking at this kind of granular data is helping the LAPD to reduce crime. The LAPD has made this information available to everyone via the web.
Go to CrimeMapping.com and search on your address or your zip code. You can set up alerts for a radius around your address – anywhere from 500 feet to 2 miles in diameter. There’s even an iphone app available.
One last point…
Be sure to report all crime to the LAPD! As you can see – it’s more important than ever to make sure that the LAPD is involved in the event of a crime (and not just ASA or any other security firm). LAPD needs to file the report so your crime gets in the system and becomes part of the data set. The information will illuminate trends and contribute to reducing crime in the future.
