NYPD Map Reveals Where Area Crimes Occur, But Not Much Else

The city has unveiled a new interactive crime map that allows you to search and learn about basic data on felony crime incidents by location for the prior calendar year, current year, and by month within the current year. While providing more detail than the NYPD’s CompStat reports, which are also available online, there’s still some info lacking to provide a complete look at what’s going on in the neighborhood.

Combined with recent reports from The Nabe and DNAinfo that have said NYPD Precincts have been instructed to stop providing access to information about local crimes to journalists for police blotters, local communities throughout the city may be left without much transparency about specific crimes occurring in their areas.

Built by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) using crime complainant data as reported to the NYPD, you can search the map by address and see what felonies have been reported in a certain area, allowing you to understand a bit about where crime is persistent, but not much more than that.

For example, 4th Avenue, between 13th and 14th Street, saw 3 grand larcenies in October, but we don’t know whether someone was mugged at knifepoint for an iPhone, if their purse was stolen, or even what time of day the crimes occurred. That level of detail is not included.

“DoITT employs innovative technology to improve the accessibility of critical public information,” said Chief Information and Innovation Officer Rahul N. Merchant. ”The interactive crime map builds on report data and presents it visually in neighborhoods across the five boroughs, keeping the public informed about what is going on in their community.”

If the blotter information is indeed made unavailable, then this map may be all that communities are going to get, at least during the last month of this mayor’s term.

We want to be able to help in letting neighbors know about what’s going on in the area, both good and bad — if you’ve been the victim of a crime in South Slope, after you’ve contacted the police, please consider emailing us at editor@bklyner.com, and we’ll share the details here.