CrimePing

How CrimePing works

CrimePing is a free iPhone app that maps police-reported crime in Buffalo, Chicago, New York City and San Francisco using official city open data. This page explains where the reports come from, how the app searches, how it sorts reports into categories and what it doesn’t do.

Where the reports come from

Reports come from the Buffalo Police Department, the Chicago Police Department, the NYPD and the San Francisco Police Department through each city’s open-data program. All four cities publish this data on Socrata, a platform from Tyler Technologies.

CrimePing has no server of its own in the middle. When you search, your phone sends the search point and radius straight to the city’s open data and draws what comes back. CrimePing doesn’t store, edit or add to the reports.

  • Buffalo, NY

    Buffalo Police Department. Updated daily. Locations are rounded for privacy.

  • Chicago, IL

    Chicago Police Department. Updated daily, about seven days behind. Addresses are block-level.

  • New York City

    New York City Police Department (NYPD). Year-to-date complaints, published quarterly.

  • San Francisco, CA

    San Francisco Police Department (SFPD). Updated daily. Locations are snapped to the nearest intersection.

Every search has three parts: a point, a radius and a time range.

  • The point is your location, if you allow it, or a city or spot you choose. Move the map and tap Search this area to look somewhere else.
  • The radius is a quarter mile, half a mile, 1 mile, 2 miles or 5 miles. It appears on the map as a dashed orange circle.
  • The time range is the past 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or year.

CrimePing finds the city whose area contains the point and asks that city’s data for reports inside the circle and the time range. The Map, Recent and Trends tabs all show the same search. If the point is outside the four cities, there’s no data to show, and the app offers the covered cities instead.

How categories are assigned

Each police department labels reports in its own words. CrimePing keeps the department’s label on every report and also sorts it into one of six categories, so the map reads the same way in every city:

  • Violent: homicide, assault, battery, robbery, sex offenses, kidnapping, weapons offenses, stalking and intimidation.
  • Property: burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, criminal damage, vandalism, arson and trespass.
  • Vehicle: motor vehicle theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle.
  • Fraud: fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, embezzlement and identity theft.
  • Drugs: narcotics and controlled-substance offenses.
  • Other: anything that doesn’t match the five above.

The sorting matches words in the department’s offense label, and falls back to the report’s description when the label doesn’t match. Vehicle theft and identity theft are checked before general theft, so a stolen car is Vehicle and identity theft is Fraud, not Property. The categories describe the type of report, not how serious an incident was.

Why some cities lag

CrimePing can only show what each city has published so far.

  • Buffalo and San Francisco update daily, so recent days are usually filled in.
  • Chicago updates daily, but each report appears about seven days after the incident.
  • New York City publishes year-to-date complaints once a quarter, so the weeks since the last release are empty until the next one.

When a short time range looks empty in Chicago or New York City, it usually means the data hasn’t arrived yet, not that nothing happened. When a city’s data is behind, the app says how far it runs.

“Breaking” and “Latest”

The newest report inside your circle appears in a card at the bottom of the map, like the lower third of a newscast. It’s labeled “Breaking” only when the report is under two hours old, judged by the time the department recorded for it. Otherwise it’s labeled “Latest”, with its age, such as “Latest · 3 days ago”.

Locations

Several cities publish approximate locations to protect the people involved. Buffalo rounds them, Chicago gives block-level addresses and San Francisco snaps reports to the nearest intersection. Treat every pin as an area, not an address.

Alerts

In the Alerts tab you can save watch zones named Home, Work, School, Family or Gym, each with a radius of up to 2 miles, for all reports or violent reports only. When iOS allows, your phone checks those zones in the background, using the same city data, and shows a notification on your phone when it finds something new. Nothing is sent to CrimePing. iOS decides when those checks run, and alerts can’t arrive before a city publishes a report, so they are never a substitute for 911.

What CrimePing doesn’t do

  • It doesn’t edit, add or remove reports.
  • It doesn’t predict crime.
  • It doesn’t give neighborhoods safety scores, grades or rankings.
  • It doesn’t call places “dangerous”. Reports are described as reported.
  • It doesn’t publish posts, tips or comments from users.
  • It doesn’t require an account, show ads or track you.

Corrections

If something looks wrong, email support@crimeping.com with the city, the report type, the street and the time the app shows.

  • Category mistakes are ours to fix. If a report lands in the wrong category, we correct the mapping so it reads correctly for everyone.
  • Data mistakes belong to the city. CrimePing can’t change a report’s type, time or location. Those come from the police department, so corrections have to be made at the source, through the city’s open-data program. When a city corrects a report, CrimePing shows the corrected version the next time it loads.

CrimePing is not for emergencies. It can’t contact police. In an emergency, call 911.

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