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“Safe city”
Like many cities, St. Louis maintains a “Safe City incident mapping” page via its police department website. It is rather clunky in its navigation, slow to load, and even slower in processing requests. But what if you want to feel afraid right now? Well, Lifehacker points to a more responsive (if more visually alarming) option:
Crime-mapping mashup SpotCrime pulls data from city police records and news sources and plots it in an easy-to-snoop fashion. Choose a city, a time frame, and the types of offenses you want to see, and you can mouse-over the pinned icons to see thumbnail descriptions, or click an item for a full read. The site claims that humans are working in the background to make sense of the data, and that incidents show up anywhere form 3-24 hours after they’re reported. A good tool for checking out a potential neighborhood for moving or exploring, or just keeping up on what’s going down across town.
No, it doesn’t detail crimes taking place at the moment - relying as it does on police records and news reports - but it may be of interest to realtors and their clients, as well as fearful, garden-variety townies.
Man, I live in one busy city. But never fear: the mayor says they’re working on it.
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It looks a lot safer in Illinois, she said drolly.
(In fact, all those criminals look like they’re running away from Illinois.)
Yes, that contrast is funny. Of course, it’s because the database was searching only for STL results.
Oh, I knew that, but it was still a hoot.