The St. Louis County Police Department has joined the ranks of their comrades in blue in the city and created a crime-mapping database for use by the public.
The database features crime happenings for the past 90 days in municipalities patrolled by county police. (County suburbs such as Kirkwood, University City, Florissant etc. with their own police force do not report to the county and are absent from the crime map.) These three cities represent a large population within St. Louis County. It's a shame they are not reporting. Visit maps.stlouisco.com/police/index.html.
St. Louis County police chief Timothy Fitch says the database was created in-house and at no additional expense to taxpayers. (Perhaps that's why the map is missing a toggle bar allowing you to move your vantage point around inside the map -- the main flaw I've found so far with the website.)
As for other imperfections to the site...the database forces users to click their way past several disclaimers stating that the county police are not responsible for any errors in the crime reports. They simply enter into the database any and all incidents that come their way.
Checking the site today, the database already contains crimes committed within the past 24 hours. As stated earlier, the St. Louis police have had a similar database now for at least a year -- perhaps longer.
Friday, October 09, 2009
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