Tracking St. Louis Crime? There's an App for That

Update, June 24: The CrimeReports mapping program now seems to be working accurately. Police spokeswoman Erica Van Ross tells me there was a problem with a "widget" earlier this week connecting the police department's website to CrimeReports' database.

Now when you go to department's Crime Mapping feature it takes you directly to CrimeReports, which informs that through June 21 there have been 61 homicides in St. Louis, or five more than we've tallied here at Daily RFT.

The I-phone app also works swimmingly (at least on my phone) and can add a cheap thrill to any walk through the neighborhood. How so?

Turn on the sex offender tool on the app and up pops a map marking the residences of all the creeps in your hood. Click the link on the map and up pops a picture of the perv! Fun times indeed.

Original post on the CrimeReports feature follows...

Good news? The St. Louis Police Department has launched a new online crime tracking tool that will save the city about $16,000 per year.

The bad news? The new mapping service, CrimeReports, still doesn't contain up-to-date information. For example, this morning I tried to search the map for homicides committed in St. Louis in the past month. According to CrimeReports, St. Louis has had just one murder in that time frame. As anyone who follows DailyRFT's The Big Bloody knows, that's just not true.

So how up-to-date is the information in CrimeReports?

According to my research, it's at least three weeks behind.

But, I got to say this, the CrimeReports software and map are much more user-friendly than the previous SafeCity web tool.

Oh, and CrimeReports also has a free iPhone app that can inform the environmentally unaware when they've entered a crime-plagued neighborhood. When working properly, the app gives techies a second or two to prepare for the impending theft -- by gunpoint -- of their iPhone.