SpotCrime.com is a popular and comprehensive source of crime information on the web. The reported crimes include arrest, arson, assault, burglary, robbery, shooting, theft and vandalism. This data enables us to compare the crime rates in different cities. SpotCrime is owned by ReportSee, Inc.The crimes reported in any city/state can be looked up by entering the relevant address. The information is mainly collected from news reports and police departments. Also,new crimes can be reported.One of the main advantages of SpotCrime is that the crime locations are displayed on Google maps.
The link is http://www.spotcrime.com/. The data from spotcrime.com can be obtained by aggregating the RSS feeds. These feeds which are XML files can be used as source for visualizations. For example, http://s3.spotcrime.com/cache/rss/san-antonio-denver-heights.xml http://s3.spotcrime.com/cache/rss/pittsburgh-mount-washington.xml
(These are obtained from the RSS feeds section in Spotcrime.com)
If required, the feeds can first be converted to JSON/CSV formats and then used in the visualizations. For example, in the link http://geocommons.com/overlays/156043 , the RSS feeds are used as the source and made available to the users in JSON, Excel and other formats.Some of the static datasets can also be found. For example, here is one dataset: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/crime-data/versions/1 (Please click 'View as Text' in the above link)
In addition, an interesting visualization built in HTML5 and Protovis shows when these crimes happen in 25 different cities across the Unites States and can be found here.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotCrime.com
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