Filing Police Reports on the internet: Coming to Cleveland

Posted on July 10, 2008. Filed under: Web 2.0 Stuff, urbanplanning |

Finally,

An online form to allow residents to file police reports for minor incidents and petty crimes is coming to Cleveland, according to the Plain Dealer’s Henry Gomez . Now, it could even be more effective to have all incidents reported, so then we could have something like chicagocrime.org which could inform police and residents where are the hot spots truly are and give people objective data to form their perspectives and decisions within the police department and community.

Lastly, according to this plain dealer op-ed, http://www.cleveland.com/editorials/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/121541948227330.xml – [Link is already broken - can't the PD just keep their website organized and not move their web pages so readers can access them in the future ?] july 7, 2008, it said the online reporting system for broken-window related crimes [vandalism, small theft, etc] will be available about Six months from now.

This has a great opportunity to identify trends [popular locations, crimes, etc] and keep an organized system of these incidents, besides just paper copies at each district [I presume that paper copies is all they have].
With this information, the police department has to actually use it to make their decisions and implement the decisions (the devil in the details).

6 Months later, let’s see if the City council’s promise [and the PD's prediction] will come through. (That reminds me, what about the city’s plan to reinstate the recycling plan, when was old brooklyn scheduled to receive new garbage cans ?)

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3 Responses to “Filing Police Reports on the internet: Coming to Cleveland”

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I’m wondering if the Cleveland Police and, the more renowned, City of Cleveland really want the residents to know where the crime hot-spots are. I’m assuming most of the residents, myself and yourself included, have good ideas of where the most crime-ridden neighborhoods are; but imagine if this data were published in an accredited paper for all to see! Especially to the concern of The City would be possible New Residents. Since crime is already under-reported there would be no reason for the city to want to make more of those incidents known to potential tax-payers. This is all assuming the data is made public, which it may not be. Only time will tell.

I HOPE this initiative becomes a reality so that we all know accurately what is happening in out city and if there is anything we would be able to do about it.

Kris
July 12, 2008