Avencia, a geospatial products and services firm based in Philadelphia, has recently rolled out the first production version of CrimeBase (http://www.cml.upenn.edu/crimebase/) for the University of Pennsylvania's Cartographic Modeling Lab and the Philadelphia Police Department. The new application provides public access to police incident information from 1998-2003. The incident data is summarized to a number of different geographic units including Neighborhoods, Councilmanic Districts, Police Districts, Public School Catchments, Zipcodes, Census Tracts and Census Blockgroups. The innovative software framework includes the ability to create maps and display tables, statistics, charts and trends and is based on the SUMS software framework. This project is an example of a successful collaboration between a public government agency, a private research institution and a commercial technology company. Avencia specializes in these type of collaborative projects, and we are very excited about the improved access to police information this new application will provide for the public.
