Power to the public police records, people
Used to be that finding out about crime in a KCMO neighborhood was a big fat pain in the butt. To get public records of KCPD crime reports, you had to download giant Excel pdfs and sift through them looking for addresses in your area. Or endlessly bug the KC Star reporters who run
Crime Scene KC to post the records online when they
randomly and irregularly received them from the police.
No mas! Now KCPD’s long-promised public record crime reporting system is
online. All the KCPD data is being fed into
CrimeReports.com, which features a really nice map interface showing all the 24-hour badness happening in KCMO. Just enter your (or any KCMO) address, and off you go. You can break results down by type of crime, distance, period of time, etc.

Color me excited. It’s nice to see a little bit of that “promise of the Intarnet” thing working here locally. And to know that someone finally called the police on that asshole down the street who’s always drunkenly yelling at his girlfriend…
(For the interesting fine print, such as how much the city is paying for this, check out the CrimeReports.com
law enforcement page and FAQ.)