CrimeBase is a web-based tool that provides citizens with crime data for their communities.

Client: Cartographic Modeling Lab, University of Pennsylvania

Challenge: The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) collects a large amount of data on crimes in the city, to which the public requests access. While access to this data is important to the general public, the PPD has a responsibility to protect victim confidentiality and is thus unable to release all of the incident-level data.  The PPD also lacks the time and manpower to respond to each individual data request.  Despite these concerns, the Police Department saw a need to make more crime data public on a regular and ongoing basis.

Solution:  Azavea created CrimeBase, a web-based application where users can access, manipulate, and download crime data from the internet.  CrimeBase users can create maps, charts and tables and track crime trends in their communities.  Police data can be accessed and analyzed at a variety of geographic levels including police districts, neighborhoods, and census tracts.  By using data that is displayed in geographic aggregates, the system protects the confidentiality of crime victims while providing planning data to concerned Philadelphians.

Outcomes: CrimeBase provides data to thousands of users each year.  By protecting confidentiality and providing data at useful geographic areas, CrimeBase allows users to make informed policy choices, create custom data, and track the change over time in their neighborhood.  CrimeBase’s unique ability to scale data aggregations based on user-defined geographies has enabled the Philadelphia Police Department to move beyond providing static data at the police sector or district level, to an interactive and user-driven format.

Website: http://cml.upenn.edu/crimebase/

Publications:
Directions Magazine