This is a project born out of two stolen car radios. Both were mine; from the same car, in two locations two years apart.
After the second theft, which happened in the middle of a rash of car break-ins in the spring and summer of 2006, I began to get the idea that it would be nice to know a little about patterns of crime in the city, so people could make more informed decisions about where to visit, where to rent, and so forth. A weekend later, and I had the basics of this page. All that was left to do was add content.
I made the decision that I would only add incidents which were covered in the local online news sources. It seemed a good way to rapidly fill the map and uncover patterns which could be put to use by those with the resources to do to. Unfortunately, Grand Rapids is very news-poor when it comes to the internet. Wood TV's website is the only one I have found which (a) covers local news in a timely fashion, (b) archives their stories and provides search mechanisms, and (c) is not a glorified TV guide.
As of January 1, 2008, there are 180 incidents highlighted on this page. More are added every few days. The incidents can be filtered visually by type of crime, year, month, zip code, or city quadrant, or any combination of these.
Right now I enter all of the information manually into an XML file which can be viewed here. Future plans include building a web-based content entry system for this page, and eventually (ideally), pulling information directly from the Grand Rapids Police Department databases.
If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to contact me using the information on the "about" page of my website.