Two departments of City Hall have rolled out new online services this week that build on a growing toolset for Seattle citizens. The people who create the technology behind CHS and a network of sites here in Seattle also have some cool new geek goodness to share, too. First, let’s check in with Seattle City Light and SPD.
City Light’s new Streetlight Tracker http://www.seattle.gov/light/streetlight/tracker.asp is both a way for you to report a dark streetlight on your block and it surfaces status on other recently reported outages across the city. Here’s the status map as of this weekend. North Capitol Hill has been busy reporting its broken streetlights, it seems.
More info from SCL about the app:
The Web application is up-dated daily, five days per week. Customers still are able to talk directly with a customer service representative by calling (206) 684-7056. The new service is designed to give customers better access to streetlight information and reporting streetlight outages.
Meanwhile, SPD is making the process of reporting low level crimes easier with its new system rolled out this week:
This service will allow the public to file a report at a time that is best for them without having to wait for an officer to respond or call them back. The public will be able to print a temporary copy of the report as soon as they submit it. The report will be reviewed by police personnel, and, once approved, the filing person will receive an email with a copy of the final report attached. The report will transfer directly into the Seattle Police Department records management system and receive the same investigation and statistical analysis as if the report had been filed by an officer.
This option is for low level property crimes only. It does not replace 911 or the non-emergency number. If the caller feels that they are in danger, or the crime just happened, or the suspect may still be there, 911 is still the best option. The Community Online Reporting Program is an option for people that want to report a low level theft, but do not necessarily need an officer to respond in person.
You can access the new service by going to http://www.seattle.gov/police and clicking “File a Report”
Not to be outdone by all this innovation in the public sector, we’ve been busy working on some new stuff for our Neighborlogs family of sites. If you didn’t know, in addition to my work here at CHS, I’m part of a small, four-person Seattle start-up that makes technology for community news sites. My counterpart in this fun runs Central District News. Since he wrote all the cool code, I’ll let him introduce our new amazingness:
Check out the Capitol Hill Crime map with the new data enhancements
One of our more frequent requests are of the form of “what’s the story with those sirens/police/fire trucks on my block last night.” We love those kinds of tips because they’re often the key to big stories that we would otherwise miss.
But the challenge is that it’s sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack. The time of the event is the biggest factor – every 15 minutes of uncertainty quadruples the time it takes to research what happened.
But we’ve recently added some new features to the crime map at SeattleCrime.com (part of our Neighborlogs network of sites). It’s now slurping in police dispatch data, recording every time an officer is sent out to deal with a crime or other event. The events are usually delayed by up to several hours, as the city doesn’t release the data until the event is closed and it will be safe to do so. But it appears to be working well for finding events that happened within the last day.
So please explore the SeattleCrime map, and if you’re interested in a specific event, send us the event name and the time it occurred. Then we can more easily go back and get all of the details about what happened.
And if you’ve got an iPhone, check out the Seattle Crime app – it puts all those same mapping tools in your pocket.
One kind of cool layer in the new dataset is information about SPD traffic incidents. Here’s a map of locations where tickets were handed out on the Hill this week, both moving and parking violations. Please use this info for good, not evil!
