Chicago crime maps

Deceptive practice / Fraud or confidence game

Chicagocrime.org has nifty views of crime in Chicago. You can browse by date, type of crime, street, type of location (ATM, Abandoned building, Airport/aircraft, Alley, etc.). (via O'Reilly Radar)

It remixes Google Maps with the Chicago Police Department's Citizen ICAM Web site. The Citizen ICAM site is pretty useful on its own. It limits your search in some ways: you can only cover a small area, and you can only search 2 weeks at a time. On the other hand, you can really search and not just browse, which the chicagocrime.org site is limited to (so far). The CPD's site lets you combine date, address/intersection/beat, and type of crime. It also uses different symbols for property and violent crimes, rather than just generic G flags.

The chicagocrime.org site is definitely more fun, though. "Unlawful use of recorded sound" sounds more like a job for the RIAA than the CPD — but I'm too lazy to actually find out. Most crimes map fairly well onto poverty * population density. But not everything. "Unlawful use of a computer" falls overwhelmingly on the North Side. And it sure looks like a pattern of selective enforcement for "Possession: Cannabis less than 30 gms."

In some ways, I am disappointed in my fellow Chicagoans. How can we keep up with New York and Miami when we have nothing under "Ritual Mutilation?" And bribery isn't much better: a paltry three offenses (However, both sites stress that they can show only reported crimes.).