Today we’re proud to announce San Francisco Crimespotting, an interactive map of crime in the city that Stamen calls home.

We’ve timed today’s release to coincide with the public launch of DataSF, San Francisco’s new clearinghouse for city government data. Crime incident data used in SF Crimespotting comes directly from the city this time, and we’re thankful to their team for making this data source one of the first ones available at launch.

We’ve made some improvements to the UI in the process of adapting the map to San Francisco’s geography, specifically:

• The crime type filters are grayed out when no crimes of that type exist in the selected date range. (You may have noticed that there aren’t any Alcohol or Prostitution markers, even in the Mission. That’s a bug, and we’re working on it.)
• The weekly labels on the date slider are clickable, so you can more easily select weeks at a time.

Because San Franciso is shaped differently from Oakland, we’re investigating ways to reorganize the interface elements so that the entire city is visible in the initial map view.

All in all, though, we’re very happy with it and agree that crime has never looked so good.

We’re happy to release two updates to the interactive map that address our most frequent feedback requests: you can now filter crime reports by time of day, and link to and view custom reports for the last two years of crime in Oakland.

Hours

The interface we’ve created to navigate through the hours of the day is something we’re calling the “time pie”, a small circle not unlike a pie chart, with the full 24 hour cycle around its perimeter. Noon is at the top, midnight is at the bottom, 6pm and 6am to the left and right. Hours of sunlight are shown as a slight shading in the background of the circle, and these update according to what day you’ve selected. The hours of the time pie can be individually switched on and off, and you can also click and drag it to enable or disable a range of hours. Any time span can be selected, and we’ve added a set of buttons that show a few time slices that we think are particularly meaningful:

• Hours of daylight and darkness based on local sunset and sunrise times
• Commute hours for the morning and evening
• Nightlife hours spanning happy hour to last call
• Three police shifts: day, night, and swing

We’re hoping these categories will broaden the project’s reach, and make it that much more useful to both the public and the police alike. The last time slices (day, night and swing) are the ways that the police view this information, and one thing we hope will come from the project is a better understanding of how the police view their data as it’s collected.

We think the time pie is better than anything else out there in the online crime mapping world- as far as we know, Crimespotting is the only site to offer a filter for specific hours of the day on an interactive map - please leave a comment below if you know different.

Days

We’ve also upgraded the the map’s date slider to include data all the way back to our summer 2007 launch. You can now page back and forth week by week using the two large arrows to the left and right of the date slider, and you will also find drop-down menus to quickly jump to a particular month and year in the past. Finally, there’s a button that will navigate to the most recent week of report information.

Years

The data for the new years-long timespan is something we’ve always kept, but we were reluctant to display it on the site because we lacked a good method for visually navigating it. With the introduction of these hour and day widgets, it now makes sense for us to open the entirety of our archives stretching back to the middle of 2007. This means that old URLs for static representations of crime reports are now newly available, as well as a complete catalog of all reports made available to us in the Police Department’s nightly spreadsheets.

Links

The long and the short of this new version is that it’s much easier to see and link to a broad range of times and dates. In particular, it’s now possible to navigate and link to recent newsworthy events like the assassination of journalist Chauncey Bailey, the Oscar Grant riots from January 2009, and the Lovelle Mixon incident from this past March. You can also retrieve data in spreadsheet form for individual police beats for any time in the past, helpful for a longer term understanding of neighborhood crime patterns.

Together, these two additions to the site make for a richer, more useful historical document and local watchdog tool. Please let us know what you think.

You may have noticed that the Oakland Crimespotting map changed its appearance this week. We’ve switched to OpenStreetMap so that the public can contribute their own local knowledge and make Crimespotting a better service.

The most important thing to say about the new map design is that it’s made of geographical data from the OpenStreetMap project, the free world map that anyone can edit. It helps Oakland by providing a way for users of Crimespotting to share their own local knowledge with the broader OpenStreetMap community to help generate an excellent, extensive map of the city. Examples of such knowledge include: parks, schools, commercial districts, businesses, government buildings, walking paths, cycle routes, and other street-level information that might otherwise fall through the cracks of a map provider such as Google or Microsoft.

We like and use Virtual Earth maps in particular, but these maps were originally created to suit the purposes of transportation, such as commercial drivers interested in directions. The two maps above are examples of the difference. The first is a Microsoft Virtual Earth map in the style that we featured here previously, and it provides accurate, reliable information about streets and major geographical features. What it’s missing can be seen on the second, which has markers for public schools, hospitals, and train stations throughout the city. These landmarks are important for a site like ours, primarily built for local residents interested in learning about neighborhoods.

Zooming in to the Uptown area around Broadway and Grand Ave. shows how a variety of local businesses and points of interest have been added to the map to provide local context and an understanding of the street from a ground level view. All of the churches, schools, and cafés seen in this second view were added by participants with a local interest in the neighborhood:

OpenStreetMap is primarily a collection of geographic data, and encourages interested users to create their own renderings for specific purposes. We’re using a visual style called “Pale Dawn”, which we designed for a CloudMade, a company developing commercial uses of the extensive OpenStreetMap data set. The visual design is low contrast, and developed especially for the presentation of layered, dense data such as crime reports. Geographical details are plainly visible, but are more subtle. Streets and highways, for example, don’t visually collide with the red, green, and blue crime report markers that we place over the surface of the map. It’s easier to see what’s important and use the map as background for the information we’re presenting on it.

The easiest way to describe the project is by an analogy to Wikipedia: participants in OpenStreetMap are the authors of a free worldwide map. They can use a variety of editing tools from graphical editors that work in a browser to let you trace aerial photographs of streets and buildings, to simple notification systems for marking mistakes on the map, all the way to sophisticated GPS-based tools that let users map entirely new parts of the world from scratch.

OpenStreetMap has an excellent introduction on their website.

We’re excited to be trying something new. Oakland Crimespotting is rooted in a very local concern with our neighborhoods, and we’re hoping that using maps made by real people who live in Oakland will add an extra level of usefulness to the project. If you’re of a technical bent and see something that you think should be changed, we’re really hoping you take a moment over at OpenStreetMap to add to the project. We’ve also started a blog, so it should be easier to keep track of what we’re up to. And as always, please feel free to mail us at info@crimespotting.org.

More about OpenStreetMap

There are two ways you can help fix mistakes and get new information into the base map. If you see a problem, the simplest thing to do would be to make a note of it for someone else to fix, using the OpenStreetBugs service to point out and describe the issue. If you feel confident using graphical tools in the style of a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator, you may find it easiest to simply make a change yourself. A guide to Potlatch, the OpenStreetMap editor, can be found here:

• OpenStreetMap introduction video
• Potlatch introduction video
• Potlatch primer article

If you’re interested in a more hands-on introduction to editing the map, OpenStreetMap’s Bay Area Community Ambassador Sarah Manley runs frequent weekend mapping parties.

You don’t often hear from us apart from our daily neighborhood alerts.

We’re writing today to ask you a special favor. Our friends at Spot.Us and OakBook Magazine are pitching a special investigative report on the difficulties of the Oakland Police Department: on any given day, the department has an absentee rate of 30 percent. Morale is in the cellar. The current chief has taken a leave of absence, and from the outside, it’s not clear who is running things.

Reporter and OakBook editor Alex Gronke hopes to “arrive at a deeper understanding of what ails OPD, what internal culture gives rise to the failings described above. This is not the sort of reporting that is likely to turn up evidence of concealed wrongdoing, but rather it seeks to shine a light on problems that are hiding in plain sight.”

Gronke’s pitch, Oakland Police Blues, is currently at 63% of its $1000.00 goal. Can you help push it to 100% with a small donation of $10-$25?

Normally, such investigations are funded by news organizations, but Gronke is turning to the “community funded reporting” of Spot.Us, a non-profit project of the Center for Media Change. All your donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license.

Please visit Spot.Us now to learn more about this project and Alex Gronke’s pitch: http://spot.us/pitches/35

We’re happy to announce that Oakland Crimespotting is back, thanks to the generous help of Oakland’s City Information Technology Department. After three months without access to report data, we’ve been granted a reliable, regularly-updated source of crime report information. This is great news: it means that the website is back up and running with current information, e-mail alerts and RSS feeds work again, and we at Stamen Design can explore new ways of presenting and publishing this important information.

Here are a few things you can do, now:

• Visit the site
• View a map
• Sign up for alerts

We are also interested in what additions to the site you would find useful or interesting. So far, we’ve had a number of suggestions that we’re actively looking into: spreadsheet-friendly downloads, details on individual police beats, a search function, and more than one month’s worth of data. If you have any thoughts on these or other ideas, send us a mail at info@crimespotting.org.

Our return would not have been possible without the help of a few key people. Ahsan Baig, Ken Gordon, and Bob Glaze at Oakland City IT built and published a source of information for us. Ted Shelton, Charles Waltner, and others helped us navigate the difficult waters of City Hall communications. Jason Schultz, Ryan Wong, Karla Ruiz, and Jeremy Brown at U.C. Berkeley Law School helped us understand how to best approach city governments for information. Kathleen Kirkwood and Pete Wevurski at The Oakland Tribune helped us understand the journalistic context of the project. Dan O’Neil and Adrian Holovaty at EveryBlock.com were a valuable sounding boards for ideas.

Oakland Crimespotting is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland and a tool for understanding crime in cities.

If you hear sirens in your neighborhood, you should know why. Crimespotting makes this possible with interactive maps, e-mail updates, and RSS feeds of crimes in areas that you care about.

We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.

Instead of simply knowing where a crime took place, we would like to investigate questions like: Is there more crime this week than last week? More this month than last? Do robberies tend to happen close to murders? We’re interested in everything from complex questions of patterns and trends, to the most local of concerns on a block-by-block basis.

If the local papers didn’t report a rash of car break-ins in your neighborhood, how would you know? The web opens up opportunities to find information without having to rely on which stories make it to the front page of the newspaper, or the lead story on the evening news. We need to be able to explore public information, to draw connections, and to see new possibilities for questioning. Crimespotting enables us to do more than search for the things we already know.

We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.

This project is a work in progress; a way of discovering what kinds of questions we can ask. We hope that it will open up a space for even more questions, and provide some answers. We invite the public to use this data to become better informed about what’s happening in their communities and to draw new conclusions of their own.

Oakland Crimespotting was designed and built by Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski, Tom Carden, and Eric Rodenbeck.