10.27.09, 10:09 AM EDT
Can Colin Drane create the AccuWeather of criminal data?
Colin Drane recalls an odd crime spree that unfolded near his home in Baltimore a few years ago: Neighbors’ copper downspouts were suddenly disappearing. As the thefts grew, he reasoned that if his neighbors could see a map denoting exactly where the gutter bandits were operating, preventive action could be taken. Drane awoke one morning with the idea of using his car’s global positioning system as a model–until he discovered that it, too, had been stolen.
Since then, Drane, an informercial marketer and inventor of products like the Trunkanizer (organizes groceries in your trunk) and the Invisilift (enhances a woman’s bustline) has watched his most successful invention, SpotCrime, rocket to success.
The self-financed venture, which has cost him $800,000 to launch, places widgets and ticker feeds of crime data on the Web sites of 90 television news stations in the U.S., Canada and U.K. The digital streams originate from Drane’s Baltimore headquarters, where five full-time staff and another 25 freelancers pull the information together. They get their crime intelligence from local news accounts, police departments and by monitoring police scanner traffic.
When a crime report comes in, the data first gets geo-coded (assigned a longitude and latitude). It’s then plotted on a local map of where the crime occurred, like a digital pushpin. The information is distributed in real time to news sites and via RSS feeds to SpotCrime Twitter and Facebook pages. The data can also be viewed on Apple iPhone apps Drane has created for the cities of New York, San Francisco, London and Baltimore.
SpotCrime staffers plot the location of 200,000 crimes a month, overlaying local maps with one of eight icons. Handcuffs mean criminal mischief; a little blue man is a theft; a clenched fist is an assault. In Manhattan recently, a clenched fist in the Flatiron district meant “Three men were charged with beating a man who spent too long in the men’s room of a bagel shop.” A blue man on a corner indicated “A Playboy model’s $1,800 bunny outfit was stolen as she shopped in a trendy Greenwich Village store.”
Getting an early fix on where robberies and shootings occur may let people discover crime hot spots before they boil over, says Drane. When a crime happens close to home, SpotCrime will send you an e-mail alert. “If you shorten the feedback loop between the moment a crime occurs and the point you become aware of it, you make communities safer,” he says.
SpotCrime.com Crime Mapping 