The Seattle Police Department is excited to present an enhancement to the online reports we launched earlier this month. The Department has been working closely with the City’s Department of Information Technology (DoIT) to provide enhanced information on crime to the public. This new application will go a long way to providing easy access to information that our community members have been asking of us for many years while also increasing Department transparency.
This new information will be an added service layer to Seattle’s My Neighborhood Maps already available online at www.seattle.gov . The Police Reports Map will show mapped crime icons based on initial police reports taken by officers when responding to incidents around the city. After the information enters the Department’s Records Management System it populates this map.
Please take the time to try out this new application. The link to Police Reports Map can be found here:
http://web1.seattle.gov/mnm/policereports.aspx
Links directly to the related police reports from the map icons will also become available. As with the existing Police Reports application announced earlier, care is taken to redact victim and other sensitive information from what is available online.
The crime reporting map is a short-term view of crime: it provides a good sense of what is reported to be going on in a certain neighborhood or the city at large at any time. It is also good for seeing patterns of types of crimes happening (such as an unusual amount of reported bike thefts in your area).
The Police Reports Map will not link to a redacted narrative of a police report on every crime. However, every icon on the map will have a related General Offense (GO) number. You may use that number to request a copy of any unavailable report.
We think the public will find this new feature to be useful and informative.