The Legacy of ChicagoCrime.org

Update: (same day) Sean Gillies explains that it’s not going to be shut down  but rather redirected to a new site with the same data and a different look.  Yes, that’s true.

—-original post—————

Bloggers have noted that Adrian Holovaty’s Chicagocrime.org will be shut down soon (read Holovaty’s commentary here). If you’ve not heard, there’s been quite a legacy of mashups that followed it and Housingmaps.com. Perhaps the best known in the crime space is CrimeReports.com which launched last year. Police departments pay a small fee (hundreds of dollars a month) and the service pulls out crime data from its system(s) and maps it. Apparently, it’s the “pulling out” and “fusing” of the raw data that’s the tough part. Putting it up on a Google Map (complete with e-mail alerts for those intersted in reports from specific areas) is not so difficult.

Crimes, by the way, are located based on a block, not a specific address to protect victims.

- AP