In various community meetings over the last couple of weeks, some members of the New Orleans Police Department brass have made occasional, passing reference to the city’s new crime maps, accessible either through the City of NO Web site or NOPD.com. Actually navigating to the crime maps, however, requires quite a bit of guesswork and several clicks. Furthermore, given the lack of publicity they’re providing the new crime mapping resource, and after seeing the lack of meaningful information in the actual product, citizens might well wonder if the New Orleans Police Department really wants citizens to know about crime in their neighborhoods?
The NOPD continues to host the old static JPEG maps in its sidebar “NOPD Crime Maps” link, so you won’t find the new crime maps there. Note, as well, that the JPEG maps were updated on 1/26/07 — now almost two weeks ago. Does the NOPD not want citizens to find the new crime mapping Web site? Why not update the sidebar link so it takes users to the new maps? I suspect that, more than anything, the only reason why the sidebar link sends users to the old maps is because there’s no one at the NOPD who knows how, or who’s authorized, to update the hyperlink. There’s another story in there about why the NOPD can’t attract competent civilian technical support staff.
So how can citizens access the NOPD crime maps? You’re about to see how. First, you might want to freshen that cup of coffee, sit down, take a deep breath, and relax — prepare yourself to go through a mental roughride.
First of all, you have to understand that there’s no direct link to the new NOPD crime maps. There’s only one way into the portal, and users are several clicks removed from an actual crime map. The city paid an outside contractor to create a single portal for all mapping services — everything from property information, to permits, to drainage basin repairs, to day care centers, is accessible in a single Web page. It would be a noble and useful concept if the information provided wasn’t so completely meaningless.
I just looked up a street service-cut map and was returned a sea of blue dots inside a 2-mile-wide map, and a bunch of records below the map with no reference to the map other than a cross street address, and a status — either “completed” or “backfilled”. Moreover, the map simply doesn’t make any sense. Looking at the legend, the “completed” icon is supposed to be a beige square; the “backfilled” icon is supposed to be a red square. There’s no icon listed in the legend for a big fat blue circle. There is, however, an indication that polygons shaded blue are water areas. Is the map telling us that there are thousands of water breaks? I think not — it’s simply a poorly-developed product.
It’s interesting to note that there are no tools for navigating around the map — e.g., pan, zoom in, zoom out — and although the initial address search returns a lot address map at a comprehensible scale, all of the other maps are at such a small scale that it renders the maps meaningless. Users can change the search radius, but that doesn’t change the map scale, it just reduces the size of the circle, and the number of records returned and mapped.
This would be a mediocre start for the government, but the site wasn’t developed by the technologically-impaired city staff. It was developed by a private contractor. I think it’s fair to expect a better product from the private sector. Taxpayers certainly pay more for the expertise (ahem … they might like to know how much the contractor has paid in campaign contributions to Mayor Ray Nagin). The Web site is like getting the newspaper delivered to your doorstep, but it’s written in Swahili, and you don’t have a translation dictionary. Sure, the information’s being delivered, but you can’t make any sense of it.
Here, then, are the steps required to get to a crime map of your neighborhood:
- Log on to the City of NO Web site and navigate to the NOPD Web site using the “Departments and Agencies” drop-down box in the left hand sidebar. Alternatively, log on to NOPD.com.
- Once on the NOPD Web site, scroll almost to the bottom of the page. Look for the blue flag with yellow fleur de lis. Just below the flag graphic, there’s a hyperlinked sentence which reads, “Click this link to view real-time crime statistics and other information in your area by typing an address.” The message is more than just a little deceiving, as you’ll soon discover, because the crime page is anything but “real-time” or “statistical.”
- Upon clicking the hyperlink and then acknowleding a pop-up disclaimer window, you should find yourself on an address search page featuring a clunky interface which requires that the user enter separately the various elements of an address, and which doesn’t allow any intersections or free-form address entry with intelligent fuzzy matching like Google maps allows.
- For the purposes of this exercise, I chose 1725 Tulane Avenue, the site of the Wednesday four-alarm fire at the Economy Lodge.
- After the lot boundary map for the address is finished rendering, you’ll have to choose “NOPD” from the “City Services” drop-down box in the toolbar located below the banner.
Here’s the result:
The first thing you might notice is that all of the icons look exactly the same. There’s no differentiation to represent different crime types. The scale of the map makes it difficult to discern street names. There’s also a long list of thefts listed in the records displayed below the map. It isn’t until scrolling to the third page that more serious crimes can be found. The records are stale — at least two-weeks old. Again, changing the search radius from 1 mile to 0.1 mile doesn’t change the map scale; it just reduces the size of the search radius circle, and the number of records returned. There’s no logical sort order to the records, although there is a sort button at the top of only two fields displayed — crime type and date — but there’s no way, for example, to sort all robberies by date. It’s critical to note the gross oversight — or negligence — in displaying only five crime categories: assault, auto theft, burglary, robbery, theft. Fortunately, we live in a city where (at least according to the NOPD map) there’s no murder! Shootings? Rapes? How would we know that a particular pair of juveniles were recently terrorizing kids by trying to steal their bikes? How would we know that there’s been a rash of shootings around a particular bar? Presumably, the shootings, rapes, other violent crimes (and perhaps even murder) are all aggregated in the “assault” category, but there’s no documentation or legend to indicate that fact. This isn’t much better than the older static JPEG maps. At least the older maps somewhat differentiated among crime types, and displayed more crime types. In fact, the new NOPD crime maps are still just dumb JPEG images. They aren’t at all interactive. It’s ten-year-old technology in an interactive Web 2.0 universe. Overall, the new NOPD crime mapping system is almost — almost — a completely meaningless product. Maybe that’s why the city isn’t eager to advertise the Web site.
I have to applaud the city for trying, because the result only underscores the need to allow citizens to develop their own crime mapping and reporting services in an open access, open source, team development environment. Why reward contractors (who pay dividends to politicians) when citizens can do a better job?! Of course, the answer is revealed in the question. I say allow the market to truly decide who can provide the best reporting and mapping services. Make the crime data available to any responsible party which wishes to develop services for the community. Ultimately, I’m confident that the best approach will prove to be one where the large pool of talented volunteers around New Orleans develop the solutions that work best for their neighborhoods. In an open source environment, better solutions can be developed on the achievements of others. Groups have already coalesced around this idea, pressed on by a broken criminal justice system which isn’t “getting it” — that we want more information! No one knows better than we do how information saves lives!
Public officials in the criminal justice system leave citizens little reason to trust that they’re doing the right thing. It’s time for a radical change. Citizens are always being told that the criminal justice system can’t solve the crime problem without citizen participation. It’s time for the criminal justice system to practice what it preaches by listening to citizens who are demanding greater transparency. Let’s find out where the crime hot spots are by requiring the NOPD to furnish open access to the raw 911 calls for service data. Let’s find out where the problems really are in the criminal justice system by giving us open access to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office Docketmaster records. The objections to releasing the records on privacy grounds can be eliminated by scrubbing specific victim information from the records and by averaging victim addresses. Citizens can, and will, act responsibly in their own best interest, and in the best interest of their neighborhoods, when they are entrusted with the information they need in order to own and fix the problems in their neighborhoods.
When citizens have the information they need to evaluate the safety of their own neighborhoods in a timely manner — not two weeks after criminals have left — the beleagured NOPD will secure the aid of tens or hundreds of thousands of additional eyes on the watch for perpetrators. More importantly, they can be alerted to emerging dangers in their neighborhoods. When citizens understand better the particular weak links in the system of prosecuting offenders, they can make intelligent decisions about how to correct the system.
It’s time for citizens to take a front-seat in driving criminal justice reform. The first key to unlocking the problems in that system is open access to data. The old ways of solving problems aren’t working. It will be a difficult and painful process, especially for the public officials who are hiding their deficiencies behind information barriers. Those who don’t answer the public call for open access to information are living in the past, which is exactly where we should leave them.
Citizens can do better! Public officials need to either support us, or get out of the way!
