City of Tucson. According to the latest statistics provided by the FBI, crime rates continue to decline across the country. Tucson follows the national trend and, since 2005, the violent crime rate has decreased by 34 percent.
Tucson Police Department Sergeant Diana Lopez says the public plays an important role in deterring criminal activity. She points to neighborhood watch groups as an effective tool to keep criminals at bay.
“They’re always good to have in your neighborhood,” Lopez says. “Only the neighbors can tell us who and what belongs in their neighborhood.”
Sergeant Lopez says residents in the city now have a new tool to monitor crime in their area and communicate with police. Crime Reports is an interactive, near-real-time crime map. Lopez says it offers a window into the crime trends of the city’s neighborhoods, and allows the public to make decisions based on the information provided.
“You can [subscribe to the service] and receive alerts when there are burglaries in your neighborhood,” she says.
Lopez says Crime Reports allows the public to be informed of what’s going on around them even if they are away from their property throughout the day.
Greg Whisenant is the founder and CEO of CrimeReports.com. He says the service has become an important tool for TPD, as well as hundreds of police departments around the country that choose to subscribe to the service.
Whisenant says his company exists, in part, because of the Obama administration’s push to make government more transparent and make data readily available to the general public.
“He really led the way in terms of sharing a vision of what can happen when you make raw data available to the general public,” Whisenant says. “Twenty years ago it would have been far more difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to create the type of service we’ve created.”
“We’re entering a new era, where we’re seeing raw data propagate out to the masses,” Whisenant says. In the case of Crime Reports, this means the police, as well as the public, can now use the resulting information to better understand what is happening in the community.
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