Citizen Crime Watch Blog

The NOPD is expected to announce its gussied up new crime mapping Web site over at NOPD.com.

There’s one feature in that Web site that merits considerable comment, and I will do so in time.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been collecting as much data as I can from a variety of sources, including the NOPD Web site, and the usual sources: The Times-Picayune, the French Quarter/Marigny NOcrimeline, 1st District emails, and especially helpful are the detailed 2nd District Email Blasts posted by Capt. Bouyelas.

I’ve also been adding new functionality to Citizen Crime Watch. There’s a bit more I’d like to do to style the page more, but the plan is to replace it entirely when the beta site is ready. Until then, note some of the features:

• Hot spots — a way to more clearly see where the higher densities of crime are occurring.
• The ability to search by date ranges, or preset date ranges.
• The ability to zoom to NOPD Districts or Neighborhoods.
• Icons have a white circle in them if a perpetrator has been identified, and an arrest or warrant issued.
• And now, the ability to drill down into the Orleans Parish Sheriff Docket Master Web site to read criminal histories on offenders, and to follow their court cases. As this is improved, I hope to expand the functionality to so that citizens can more readily follow crime incidents all the way through the system from arrest to final court disposition.

Just a brief post for now. I have much more expansive thoughts I’ll soon share.

Citizen Crime Watch is far from being alone in seeing the need for citizens to have open access to crime information. A recent post by Matt McAlister makes the case as well as any we have made. Interestingly enough, McAlister finds the same deficiencies with the official police maps and public reporting systems in his community that we have identified with the New Orleans Police Department.

I then found the official San Francisco Police Department Crime Map. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats. The tool is burdened with legal trappings and strangely fails to acknowledge homicides. …

Somewhere in between raw data and overt campaigning is an interesting space. Data can help us learn and make more intelligent and informed decisions about how to manage and evolve our society and its rules.

Unfortunately, that space seems more difficult to find than it should be. I should be able to download data for myself or at least be able to visualize the stories behind the data in relevant pictures and charts. …

The Citizen Crime Watch site for New Orleans gets even closer to what I want to see. Similar to ChicagoCrime.org, they visualize with your standard data-on-a-map mashup, but the hover links point to coverage in the local media. I’m suddenly given a much more human window into the crime scene, and I can read about each event. …

The City needs make it easier for its residents to both report on things that matter to us and to collect the data, filter it, and act on it.

People will always want greater access to information. This is particularly true in communities where poor decision-making creates mistrust:

“Under pressure from constituents who say New Orleans police stonewall requests for crime data, the City Council’s criminal justice subcommittee took police representatives to task Wednesday, calling for a faster, freer flow of public information…When asked for a written breakdown of policy and procedures relating to the release of public information, Maj. Michael Sauter, the head of technology, told the council most of that information was ‘not meant for the public.’” …

Rick Klau has begun experimenting with this kind of thing in response to the Magnetix toy recall incident. He calls it “Open source parenting” and observes that bottom-up community-driven politics is likely to be more successful than anything a politician can enable:

“If the government is under-staffed and under-funded to help parents avoid harmful toys, then why can’t we help ourselves?…Give thousands of parents the tools to easily identify harmful products, leverage the community’s ability to provide visibility to legitimate threats while minimizing less serious risks, and quickly disseminate information that could be instrumental in avoiding a serious accident.”

I’m suddenly wondering what role politicans will play if communities are able to form solutions to issues locally, nationally and internationally on their own. Maybe instead of legislators (or merely professional campaigners/marketers), politicians will become community managers.

I also start wondering what politicians do all day if they can’t sort out ways to curb violence in our neighborhoods. I don’t see why anyone living in this country or any other should have to worry about whether their child will be shot accidentally in his or her bedroom by stray AK47 bullets or intentionally while at school.

I’m convinced the answer is in the data that is already being collected in various government crime databases.

Commenting on McAlister’s post was Jon Udell, who identified what, outside of the United Kingdom’s Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, is the most innovative government data-sharing program in the country — raw operational data — including crime data — published on the Web for citizens to scrape and use to transform into the maps, reports, analysis, or whatever other transformations they find useful for solving problems.

Writing for InfoWorld, Udell described the DCStat program (which resembles precisely what we are so innovatively asking the NOPD to do — and eventually the entire City of New Orleans bureaucracy):

One of the speakers at InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum in New York last fall was Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat program in Washingon’s Office of the CTO. Earlier this month, he alerted me to a remarkable development. Starting in mid-June, the District of Columbia would begin releasing operational data from a variety of city agencies to the Internet in several XML formats, including RSS and Atom.

“Our expectation is that it will spawn mashups, analysis, and who knows what ripple effects,” Thomas wrote. “We also expect it will motivate government agencies to seek and sustain high levels of performance.”

On June 12 the first of the feeds — data on the disposition of service requests received by the Mayor’s Call Center and the online Service Request Center — was quietly launched at the Center for Innovation and Reform. I immediately grabbed the data, and in a few hours I had cobbled together a proof-of-concept mashup that displays requests related to street repaving and gutter repair on a map of the District of Columbia. If you’ve ever visited Adrian Holovaty’s award-winning ChicagoCrime.org, you can see what this might mean for Washington.

Here’s a critical difference, though. Holovaty had to devote a considerable amount of effort to screen scraping the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM Web site in order to extract the data — and still more effort to geocode it. I’m sure that while he was writing that screen scraper he was mentally screaming: “Just give me the data!”

DCStat is doing just that. The Atom and RSS feeds summarize activity, and all the details — including latitude and longitude — are included in DCStat’s own XML format. Following the initial launch of the service request feed, new ones will appear at roughly two-week intervals throughout the summer and fall. These feeds will contain raw operational data about crime, property, housing code enforcement, and business and liquor licensing.

Udell described the innovativeness of the DCStat program in his blog:

District of Columbia’s DCStat program rolled out last summer, I was delighted by the forward thinking involved. Publishing the city’s operational data directly to the web, for everyone to see and analyze, with the explicit goal of making the delivery of government services transparent and accountable, was and is an astonishingly bold move. And as Matt found when investigating crime in his neighborhood, it’s still part of the unevenly distributed future. …

Access to data is good, and access to data in useful formats is better, but these are only the first steps. We need to make interpretations of the data, compare and discuss those interpretations, and use them to inform policy advocacy.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this forum, the open source Web 2.0 revolution is changing the balance of power from stovepiped government organizations which conceal information, to citizens who now have the means to combine their group ideas and talents to transform raw data into new ways of understanding the world.

We need the New Orleans Police Department to catch criminals. We don’t need it to control the information about the crime occurring in our neighborhoods. The only solution to satisfy the public’s need to know, and to restore more confidence in, and cooperation with, the NOPD, is a crime incident data-sharing agreement with the NOPD.

We will create more useful and meaningful maps, reports, and alerts about crime in our neighborhoods, perform analyses to identify chronic problems and quality of life concerns, and come up with programs to strategically tackle the various problems which breed criminal behavior. The NOPD can’t win the fight against crime in our neighborhoods without our support. It’s our problem to solve. They’re our backup. We have to do this together. There’s no reason for the NOPD to block us from using whatever tools are available.

Futhermore, this isn’t just about access to crime data. It’s about access to all the forms of data which are needed to inform us about every aspect of every decision we have to make to rebuild New Orleans. The government is a purveyor of law, protection, and essential public services where the market fails. It shouldn’t be a barrier to information.

N.O. police berated over release of crime data
Council members say NOPD takes too long to inform public
Thursday, May 10, 2007
By Brendan McCarthy

Under pressure from constituents who say New Orleans police stonewall requests for crime data, the City Council’s criminal justice subcommittee took police representatives to task Wednesday, calling for a faster, freer flow of public information.

“I want information provided in real-time fashion, in a user-friendly, clear and concise way,” said Councilman James Carter, chairman of the committee. The department should provide crime data quickly and online, mapped out for easy public consumption, council members said. Police officials, in turn, argued some policies, procedures and crime data should be kept secret.

NOPD spokesman, Sgt. Joe Narcisse, head of the public information office, said the department must withhold select information to protect ongoing investigations.

“We can’t do some ‘pie-in-the-sky, give the citizens more information,’” Narcisse said in an interview. “We have to put our foot down . . . and figure out if it is prudent to do that.”

Narcisse said the NOPD “wants to make the City Council and their constituents happy,” but that the release of crime data has to be “practical and legal.”

Police Superintendent Warren Riley did not attend the committee hearing and declined through a spokesman to be interviewed. Narcisse said the chief was in other meetings all day.

The meeting marked a crescendo in public outcry over the release of crime statistics and incident reports.

“Everyone is interested in these maps,” Councilwoman Shelley Midura said. “A lot of groups are trying to create their own maps and their own information sites because they don’t feel like what they are getting from the Police Department is adequate or reliable or comprehensive.

“Obviously it is not comprehensive because you are leaving out a pretty big area of criminal activity. . . . There’s got to be a better way to inform the public.”

When asked for a written breakdown of policy and procedures relating to the release of public information, Maj. Michael Sauter, the head of technology, told the council most of that information was “not meant for the public.”

Carter asked incredulously, “Are you saying that can’t be provided to the City Council?”

The NOPD recently unveiled crime maps on its Web site, www.NOPD.com. The maps allow users to type in an address or intersection and plot crimes within a two-mile radius.

Sauter said the department recently updated the maps to reflect all homicides and shootings, and inputs most data within days of the incident. However, in an unscientific test by The Times-Picayune, the map did not include information about several recent shootings and stabbings across the city.

For instance, the maps don’t show a shooting on May 2 in the 800 block of Whitney Avenue, or a stabbing and robbery in the 300 block of Royal Street that same day. Also absent is a robbery on May 1 in the 13600 block of North Lemans Street.

Neither do the maps include sex crimes from any time period. Sauter said advocacy groups have told him they want that crime data kept private to protect the victim’s address or identity.

During the public comment section of the hearing, Brian Denzer, developer of one crime-mapping site, disputed the NOPD’s assertions of what they could and couldn’t do.

“The risk is the public will believe the NOPD is hiding crimes,” Denzer said. “There is a palpable sense of fear in the community.”

Denzer’s site, www.citizencrimewatch.org, maps violent crimes, with incident information culled from a variety of sources.

“The goal is to create an open-source crime mapping, reporting and alert system for the community, so that citizens might have a greater awareness about the safety of their neighborhoods,” according to the site.

In a telephone interview Wednesday evening, Narcisse said that providing information too quickly to the public can lead to an inflated perception of crime.

“There is a percentage of (emergency) calls that do not turn out to be what we originally wrote up,” Narcisse said. “If you come home and your chair is not on your front porch, you could call the cops and report a robbery. The complaint operator puts the call on the map as a robbery. It is, however, a theft.”

. . . . . . .

Brendan McCarthy can be reached at bmccarthy@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3301.

Mark Greenblatt, “A Numbers Game,” Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Journal, March/April 2007 (reprinted in The Gambit Weekly).

We began by requesting the most detailed incident-level data available in Houston for every crime committed in the city throughout the last three years. Each crime record we received contained information on the offense date, an incident number, offense code, police beat, census tract, city, county, time of offense, day of week, premise code and the address of the crime. We received the information on nearly 450,000 crimes in a plain-text file, which we imported into Microsoft Access.

To search for trends, we honed in on the offense code assigned to each incident. The offense code is a numerical description of a specific kind of recorded crime. We had to use the police department’s data dictionary to decipher what each code really referred to because the records track several hundred different kinds of crime.

My first question is, why can’t citizens and research institutions in New Orleans have access to this kind of data to perform analysis, and to be alerted in a timely manner to emerging public safety concerns?

We’re working on jumping through the hoops, but the progress has been slow in approving a data-sharing agreement. Caution on the part of public officials may be warranted, but those public officials who are reluctant to cooperate with citizens in furnishing more information about crime need to realize that post-Katrina New Orleans is a different place, and there are different attitudes. Citizens are more impatient than ever with bureaucratic delays in rebuilding their neighborhoods into safer, more liveable communities.

The analysis Greenblatt performed may not be rocket science, but it does require some professional education or experience. For this sort of work to be done on a regular basis, not just for a journal article, but for internal law enforcement purposes, to stay on top of shifting or emerging crime patterns, requires a dedicated vision, and full-time paid professionals.

The technology and science of crime mapping and analysis has matured in the last several years, but the New Orleans hasn’t kept up with those changes. There are two primary issues which continue to hinder the New Orleans Police Department in performing rich analysis of the data it collects every day.

1) The City of New Orleans has no vision for recruiting and retaining skilled technology professionals.

The Civil Service job descriptions and pay scales (the last time I checked) are 30 years old for skilled computer programmers, and non-existent for Geographic Information Systems developers.

I would recommend that the city focus on creating a program to modernize the way it recruits, retains, and provides opportunities for ongoing training of, technology professionals. The city should stop contracting out services to private vendors who do shoddy work at a high price, but instead, provide a career path for a core team of professionals which rewards them for innovation and valuable services provided to the city. An important component of such a program would be a review system tied to bonuses and promotions. Equally important, there should be compensated opportunities for further education in classrooms and conferences.

Technology changes every six months. Government needs to acknowledge and adjust to that reality. Moreover, for the purpose of enhancing the capacity of the NOPD to perform data analysis and supply rank-and-file officers with technology services support, the city should recruit and retain technology professionals with skills and experience specific to law enforcement. There’s a lot to learn about the particulars of how law enforcement data systems work (or should work). Technology professionals are force multipliers who can increase the effectiveness of every boot on the ground in a department rapidly diminishing in numbers.

2) The city has an antiquated records management system, and has yet to migrate the NOPD off of a paper police report system.

The ability to write reports directly to a records management system will reduce the delay in getting crucial information into a database for analysis from days or weeks, to just hours.

The city did hire out a contractor to write an electronic police report application to be used on NOPD laptops, but it isn’t now being used. What might be (generously) described as inappropriate planning for reality, the contractor developed the application to be used on a broadband wireless network — which didn’t exist.

There are other solutions which could have been envisioned, like transferring data from laptop to database using a USB thumb drive. The Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Jones, says that the city has purchased 400 new laptops which are being outfitted with Sprint broadband wireless cards to upload electronic police report data. It’s a bold vision, but the strategy merits scrutiny.

The average cost of a wireless contract, taking into consideration a bulk discount, would be about $50 a month per card. That’s $20,000 a month, or $240,000 a year. Projecting that cost over ten years, the cost will be $2,400,000. And that’s just the first 400 laptops. Scrutinizing the investment doesn’t mean that the strategy isn’t justified by the need, or that the city can’t afford it, but there are questions which should be asked. Were there were other options available? How are these decisions made? Would investments in improving the EarthLink network produce a satisfactory solution? Could the city build on the street camera wireless network for the same price to develop hotspots where reports could be uploaded? Would other common destinations for patrol units make logical sense to build wireless hotspots, at the Orleans Parish Prison, for example, or NOPD District stations? Would a simpler, less-costly solution be just as effective, such as using USB thumb drives.

Moreover, is there a strategy being developed to get those police report records out of the city’s antiquated AS/400 mainframe, with query interfaces and reporting capabilities that commanders and detectives can use in a meaningful way to perform custom analyses? The present method of getting data out of the mainframe is to write a request, and then to wait weeks or months for an old IBM greensheet printout (one wonders if there are still suppliers of that old paper stock). Try doing an analysis for patterns using a cumbersome paper printout sometime to see how impaired the NOPD is. This has got to change.

There are other areas where improvements need to be made. The NOPD data systems need to be integrated into one seamless whole with the Clerk of Court data systems, and Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff data systems, as well as other data systems of other law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan New Orleans area. Until these data system are more closely integrated, a complete picture of who the most violent repeat offenders are can’t be completed. There is quite a bit of talk between agencies to integrate, and citizens should feel optimistic that law enforcement agencies are moving in that direction, but there needs to be more public information provided about precisely what sort of planning and implementation is being considered.

In order to modernize it’s technological capabilities, the city needs to have decision makers on staff who understand technology, and who develop plans to take advantage of new technological opportunities. There’s always a cost-benefit analysis that should be performed, and budgetary constraints, but on balance, the technological investments based upon sound strategies and open planning processes will produce positive returns.

And once again — bringing this narrative around full circle — a vital component of a technological modernization strategy should be a public policy modernization strategy, to produce greater transparency, both in the decision-making process, and in furnishing records to citizens, to not only generate public confidence, but also, to create opportunities to foster innovation, ideas, research, and hopefully, solutions which will help in creating a better, safer city.

New Orleans needs a mission-to-the-moon strategy to modernize the way government functions. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just requires common sense, an awareness of how public attitudes in New Orleans have changed, and an understanding of how the world is changing technologically.

The Times-Picayune printed a Brendan McCarthy article last week which highlighted a single crime mapping initiative, NO Crime, to the exclusion of any others. The discriminating reader ought to question why the article mentioned the project founder’s name 16 times without ever once making reference to other initiatives which are already accomplishing what the NO Crime founder only proposes to do if enough people respond to her appeals for donations.

McCarthy said in a phone conversation that he was well aware of other citizen-based crime mapping initiatives around New Orleans, including Citizen Crime Watch, but said that he decided to focus exclusively on NO Crime’s founder because she’s getting the most attention. Self-promotion does have its rewards, but I suspect that citizens care more about seeing visible results.

No, McCarthy didn’t think it incongruous to highlight an initiative which has yet to produce a single crime map or crime report, while ignoring other broad-based citizen initiatives in which volunteers who are active in their neighborhood organizations are already mapping crime. The only thing those volunteers need to make those mapping services a truly meaningful resource, which would provide citizens with a daily snapshot of emerging safety concerns in their neighborhoods, is access to timely data from the NOPD. It might have been nice to give developers who have already made crime maps available to the community an opportunity to make that case for data in the pages of the newspaper. McCarthy said he would profile some other initiatives in a future article.

The Times-Picayune published the following letter in the Sunday paper:

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Re: “Activist seeking to track crimes,” Metro, March 21.

Thank you for highlighting one of the fundamental, indispensable tools necessary for keeping citizens safe from crime: information.

There are a number of citizens in New Orleans who didn’t wait for donations to roll in, but just rolled up their sleeves and volunteered their time to make Web-based crime mapping and reporting a reality.

All that’s lacking now to make these services truly meaningful is open access to crime information, supplied in an expeditious manner, so that citizens know as soon as possible the emerging safety concerns in their neighborhoods.

Better-informed citizens aren’t just safer. They are the extra eyes and ears of a beleaguered and depleted police force.

Brian Denzer
New Orleans

This is the original version of the letter:

Letter to the Times-Picayune, 3/22/07:

Thank you for highlighting one of the fundamental, indipensable tools necessary for keeping citizens safe from crime: information (”Activist seeking to track crimes,” 3/21/07).

There are a number of citizens throughout New Orleans who didn’t wait for donations to roll in, but who just rolled up their sleeves, and volunteered their time to make web-based crime mapping and reporting services a reality.

All that’s lacking now to make these services truly meaningful is open access to crime information, supplied in an expeditious manner, so that citizens know as soon as possible the emerging safety concerns in their neighborhoods. Better informed citizens aren’t just safer, they are the extra eyes and ears of a beleaguered and depleted police force.

I look forward to a future article which celebrates the tireless efforts of these true “activists” because they, too, just might have something to say that’s worth reporting.

Cordially,
Brian Denzer
citizencrimewatch.org

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. For the purposes of this exercise, I chose 1725 Tulane Avenue, the site of the Wednesday four-alarm fire at the Economy Lodge.
5. 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!