A New Look at University Crime - www.ucrime.com

These images are screen shots of the Crime Map I found on ucrime.com - a university/city based crime categorization Web site.

The idea for this post came to me from a comment I received on my blog - a man named Colin asked me if I'd seen this Web site: www.ucrime.com, and told me that they tracked crime on college campuses. I had never heard of the Web site before and decided to check it out, so I clicked on the link. Self-advertised as "the most comprehensive online source of crime information, [with] local maps, crime reports and classifications, [and] real-time interactive maps."

The Web site has listings for all 50 U.S. states and some universities in Canada, and includes crime maps, local statistics, and crime alerts. In Illinois, the university pages they include are: Bradley University, DePaul University, Illinois State, Loyola University Chicago, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern, Southern, SIU-Carbondale, Southwestern, UIC, and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The Illinois link also has a larger "Chicago Crime Map" link. There, users can type in an address and put in a date range, and look for all of the following crimes, or select a few. The crime categories you can search for are: Arrest, Arson, Assault, Burglary, Robbery, Shooting, Theft, Vandalism, and Other. The categories have little icons as well, which I laughed at. For example, arson is a little flame, arrest is a tiny pair of handcuffs, assualt is a fist, burglary is a person in a ski mask, robbery is a person running with a bag, shooting is a viewfinder icon and vandalism is a little shield. I searched for crime near my home from January 30 - Feb 6, and found out that there was one instance of assault near my home - at DePaul's Sanctuary Residence Hall.

The DePaul Crime Map itself was pretty interesting - it had tabs for the different crime categories, and included things that happened at both the Loop and Lincoln Park Campuses.
In the last week, from 1/30 to 2/6/09 there was an arrest at the Sullivan Athletic Center and an assault at Sanctuary Hall.

The map offers a clean and clear way to see where things are happening in your area, and the little icons really help you focus in.

Users can also sign up to get crime reports about their campus or state.

In addition to the Crime Map, there are links to report a crime and a UCrime blog. The link I found most interesting was under "About Us." It said, "Do you want to be a crime reporter for your university?" and then offered a link to register your name and e-mail and write a message to the Baltimore, MD based site.

All in all, the site is an interesting, helpful look at crime. I'm still partial to The DePaulia's blotter, but for a different look, check out www.ucrime.com.