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chicagocrime.org Review · 731 days ago

chicagocrime.org is a website that tracks and analyzes all crimes in the city of Chicago reported to the Chicago Police Department. You can search by crime type, address/district, date, ward, type of location (ie. ATM or bowling alley), etc.

The most interesting part of the site is the Blotter, which the site administrators use to tie down police reports within the database with actual journalist reports of the crimes from the Chicago Journal. It doesn’t look like all that many of the incidents found in the database end up being associated with synopses from the newspaper, but I think that just means the Chicago Journal misses out on a lot of crime reported. They are looking for suggestions for other newspapers who would provide synopses of Chicago crime so hopefully the Blotter will improve with time.

The second most interesting part of the site is Crimes along a route, which is a Google maps mashup that allows you to draw a route between as many points as you’d like and search the database for crimes reported along all of the portions of whichever streets you included in the route.

Now, I don’t even live in Chicago, so this is all pretty much novelty to me. However for non-residents of the Windy City, you can waste at least a few minutes playing around with the various features, then wishing they had something like this for whatever city you live in too.

— SWAT Team

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