Online mapping services help police spot trends in crime

Victoria Atencio
Post #1
9-13-09

This article was found on usatoday.com and describes the advantages of crime mapping services throughout the United States. The article explains that there are almost 1,000 police departments that are taking advantage of these services that take data from police reports and makes it available for the public through different methods including email alerts and websites with online maps. The website that the article describes, crimereports.com, is very useful in that it allows the user to type in their desired address and then populates that data within several time frames that one can choose from. Whether it is a report from the past three days or past month, the website will generate a map from Google and provide links to click on that include the address, the type of crime committed, agency who responded and at what time it was reported at. Needless to say this type of website has been proven useful in various situations such as mapping out crime trends to predict the next suspected target in a crime spree.
Social control plays a couple of roles in this article. Both formal and informal social controls are displayed throughout the article. First there is formal control which as we have learned can be described as conformity to the law that is controlled by institutions of higher power such as government laws. This relates to the article because the arrests made by the officers are forms of formal control that are used to respond to deviant behavior. Their authority to make an arrest in order to maintain social order is a critical point in this article. The second form exposed is informal social control which makes use of the unofficial process to maintain social order. For example, distributing criminal reports for the public to review allows citizens to form their own course of action. If some one where to visit crimereports.com and type in their own address only to discover that their neighborhood has had three break ins in the past week they can take control of the situation. Even though no one has ordered them to look up their address online the freedom of looking allows the public to maintain order in their own way.

Here are the links to both the article and the crime detection service. I hope you find them interesting!

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2009-09-09-onlinecrime_N.htm

http://crimereports.com/