Officials earlier this month announced that they had shut down the former CrimeMapper system in favor of posting the same data to a Web service called RAIDS Online.
RAIDS is an offering of a company called Bair Analytics Inc. that’s been doing business with the Durham Police Department since 2008. Its maps of Durham crime patterns are available at http://bit.ly/15Aooje.
The switch, however, drew protests this week from customers of another company, ReportSee Inc., which operates a Web site called spotcrime.com.
ReportSee emailed spotcrime.com subscribers to say it “no longer has access to crime data” from the city, and to encourage them to ask officials to publish it in “an open and unrestricted format.”
The result was a couple of dozen emails to the City Council that went so far as to allege that officials had made the change to cover up crime trends in advance of this fall’s council and mayoral elections.
Police Chief Jose Lopez responded Wednesday by emailing each person who complained to explain the city’s move, and to say that residents “may still obtain the same crime information that they always have at no cost.”
Lopez noted that the former CrimeMapper was developed in-house in 2005 by Durham’s city/county geographic information system unit, based on software that’s no longer supported by its original publisher.
As an in-house creation, the CrimeMapper Web site could legally be “scraped” for its underlying data by anyone with the knowledge and programming skill to write a script to extract it.
That possibility “existed as a byproduct and was not created by intent” when the Durham GIS staff wrote CrimeMapper, Lopez said.
ReportSee, meanwhile, is among several companies vying for subscriptions from people who want to know about crime happening in their neighborhood. A subscription usually comes with the promise of an emailed alert of new incidents.
ReportSee professes to obtain its data from public sources.
But in 2010, a competitor sued it in a Utah federal court, alleging that ReportSee, rather than getting its information direct from law enforcement, had actually trolled its Web site to obtain information.
ReportSee admitted that, but argued that it hadn’t done anything wrong because the competitor, PublicEngines Inc., as a contractor for law enforcement was dealing in public information.
As a defense, that didn’t get ReportSee very far. It eventually agreed to a permanent injunction that barred it from using PublicEngines’ Web sites.
Bair, like PublicEngines, bars other companies from using software “bots, robots [or] spiders” to scrape RAIDS Online for data.
And for Durham, that means the shutdown of CrimeMapper cost ReportSee the easiest way it had of obtaining mapping data.
In theory, the company can use a public-records request to obtain the data direct from the Police Department.
But state law doesn’t require the city to “provide the information in the exact format desired by the requestor,” Lopez said. Instead, it has to “make available those records which already exist.’
The chief argued that by working through RAIDS Online, the Police Department “already makes this public information available in a high-quality and useful electronic format at no cost.”
“Other Web sites can refer their customers directly to this tool, secure in the knowledge that the information is directly sourced by the Durham Police Department, or they may embed the RAIDS Online tool on their web site for convenience if they so choose,” he added.
ReportSee, as a competitor, isn’t likely to want to do that. And in fact, the company argues that single-vendor arrangements are a way for governments “to control the [flow of] information to the public and control the representation.”
The firm’s advocacy of releasing data via an “open and unrestricted format” finds echoes in the city’s recent announcement that it’s joining forces with Durham County to create an “open data partnership.”
The initiative’s purpose is to make the information the two governments hold more widely available, “without restrictions from copyright, patents or other forms of control,” their joint announcement said in November.
When asked about the flap, City Manager Tom Bonfield said the decision to use the RAIDS system offered “more flexibility and features” than the old CrimeMapper.
But he added that he’d asked the city’s public affairs director, Beverly Thompson, to work with the Police Department and the city’s technology department “to consider how this interfaced with our open-data initiative and strategy.”
Thompson couldn’t be reached for comment. The Police Department’s in-house tech guru, Jason Schiess, was out of the office on Wednesday and likewise unavailable.
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©2015 The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
