Support

CrimePing still works. Without your location, it opens on Buffalo and you can switch to any covered city.

To center searches on where you are, open the iOS Settings app, tap Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then CrimePing, and choose While Using the App. CrimePing never needs “Always”.

CrimePing shows what each city has published so far, and cities publish on different schedules:

• Buffalo and San Francisco update daily.
• Chicago updates daily, but its data runs about seven days behind, so the past week is usually empty.
• New York City publishes year-to-date complaints once a quarter. The weeks since the last release won’t appear until the next one.

If a short time range shows nothing, try 30 days or 90 days.

CrimePing shows reports as the city publishes them and can’t change them. Reports are preliminary, and police may correct or reclassify them later. The app shows the current version each time it loads.

A problem with the report itself, such as its type, time or location, has to be fixed by the city. Contact the city’s open-data program or the police department that published it: the Buffalo Police Department, the Chicago Police Department, the NYPD or the San Francisco Police Department.

If you think CrimePing put a report in the wrong category, email us. Categories are our grouping of each city’s offense labels, and we fix mapping mistakes. How corrections work.

iOS decides when background checks run, so alerts can arrive late, and sometimes not until you next open the app. A few things help:

• Check that notifications are on: Settings, then Notifications, then CrimePing.
• Check that Background App Refresh is on for CrimePing: Settings, then General, then Background App Refresh.
• Low Power Mode pauses background refresh.
• If you swipe CrimePing away in the app switcher, iOS may not run its checks until you open it again.

Alerts also depend on the city’s publishing schedule. A report can’t trigger an alert until the city publishes it.

CrimePing keeps your watch zones and settings on your phone and nowhere else. Delete the app and they go with it. There’s no account and no copy on a server, so there’s nothing else to delete. The privacy policy has the details.