PolicyMap News

By Alex Veiga, AP Business Writer




LOS ANGELES — I have no reason to feel unsafe in my neighborhood, but I appear to be surrounded by dozens of people convicted of everything from theft and sex crimes to public drunkenness and speeding.Not that I think of my slice of Los Angeles as Wisteria Lane. But the sight of a map pinpointing exactly where these lawbreakers live — or once lived — can rattle your sense of what a safe neighborhood is.

I got some insight into the criminal quotient in my neighborhood on several websites that turn government data into interactive guides of criminal activity.

For home buyers, these sites can be a tempting tool to discern whether a neighborhood is rife with crime, or a great place to raise the kids. But how accurate are the pictures they portray?

One site that debuted Friday is CriminalSearches.com.

Created by the folks behind PeopleFinders.com, the new site crunches monthly government data down to the state and county level, says Bryce Lane, president and chief operating officer of PeopleFinders.com.

“What we’re really good at is establishing connections across all these different data sets, linking it back to a particular person,” Lane said, acknowledging, however, that some data might be missing. The company also doesn’t tap into federal crime data.

The Neighborhood Watch feature lets you focus your search by address or ZIP code. You can also search by a person’s name or specific home address, and there’s a separate search with a detailed map of registered sex offenders.

Punch in the details and the site generates a map showing small squares that represent each person who resides — or previously resided — in the area and was convicted of a crime at some point. In some cases, the site will turn up people who were arrested, but never convicted.Click on an individual square and you can get the exact address for the person and a description of their violation, among other details.

The results can be eye-opening.

But as I dug deeper into the results I found that many people are listed for traffic violations, or a crime they committed decades ago, maybe in another state.

PropertyShark.com offers a more current snapshot of crime.

In some of the metro areas, such as Los Angeles, the site links to the police department’s website, where users can generate neighborhood maps overlaid with crime data less than a week old.

Some sites take a wider approach, showing crime trends but not specific locations.

PolicyMap.com taps Census data down to the each tract of land. It also works in FBI crime data at a county level. (The site plans to add city-level crime statistics in a few weeks.)

Like the other sites, PolicyMap lets you drill down to the neighborhood level surrounding a specific address. The map, uses a color system to show the degree to which a certain crime has occurred in the area.

PolicyMap also provides other community characteristics. You can see the percentage of campaign contributions that went to senators Barack Obama or John McCain, as well as the area’s ethnic composition, or even the percent of all home loans that were subprime.

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Click Here to read the full article on USA Today.

This article by Alex Veiga of the Associated Press was published July 18th, 2008 and appeared in the following publications (and many others).

Philadelphia Business Journal – by Peter Key Staff Writer

At the recent SocialDevCamp, one of the great points by Dave Troy was that we must really start to think a little more broad about the tech scene in our area.  He proposed a term “Amtrak Corridor” that basically represents the tech communities along the east coast to include Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

So while the stuff I cover here is really centered around the DC area, I took that to heart and was happy to see recently when a reader from the Philly area tipped me off to a new product released by TRF, The Reinvestment Fund, a leading non profit in revitalizing neighborhood revitalization.  The new product they released is called Policy Map, and their tag line:

• All the Data You Need
• All In One Place
• All Online

is absolutely true.  I got in and registered and played around and was amazed a the data I was able to pull together in such a short amount of time. In a matter of seconds I was able to outline my local Congressional District and layer on the per capita income.

Many in our area are in the PR, Social Media relations, and other fields where having good demographic information at their fingertips would be awesome.  Well now they do.  It is hard to even describe all that you can do, but the good folks at Policy Map have put together a great video demo of the featureset.

Go HERE to check it out.

Click here to read this article by Jimmy which appeared on Eastcoast Blogging on July 8, 2008.

By: Judy Feldman, Contributing Correspondent

The Philadelphia-based Reinvestment Fund has launched its online mapping tool called PolicyMap, according to the non-profit community development fund. This online mapping site, now open to the public, makes available a wide array of data sets, many of which were formerly available only to researchers.

PolicyMap was originally created for the investors, state and local governments, clients and foundations, to provide online and updated information about their investments and loans. The tool will be helpful to city planners, real estate brokers, builders, commercial property owners and investors. It contains more than 4,000 indicators and it continues to be updated.

Maggie McCullough (pictured), director of PolicyMap, a division of The Reinvestment Fund, told CPN, “The Reinvestment Fund makes loans not only for affordable housing but also for charter schools, and businesses like grocery stores that want to set up in urban communities in the 5-state Mid-Atlantic area. About ten years ago we set up a public policy office to better understand our investments and watch the impacts we were making, and this this led us to the creation of the mapping tool.” McCullough also noted that, “any data that we get for free, we put up for free. Some data sets we had to buy and we’re not allowed to give them away for free. But right now 80 percent of the data is free. The other 20 percent mainly includes home sales, demographics, current estimates and future projections of things like racial and income compositional data.”

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Click Here to read the full article.
This article by Judy Feldman on Commercial Property News July 7th, 2008.

There’s a fantastic new Internet tool called Policy Map.  Here’s what OpenLeft says about it:

Basically, what Policy Map does is bring data and mapping to the masses.   Given its place as a lender and public policy research center, TRF has always accumulated all kinds of data.  About a year or so ago, they decided that they were going to try and put that data online, in a way that the general public could see it.  And from that, and many (many) hours of development, PolicyMap was born.  They mapped something like 4000 pieces of data, and then put it online in a format where anyone can map it.  And if they got the data free (ie, Census, etc), they give it away for free too.For policy nerds, this is about as cool as it gets.

I agree.  It doesn’t have all kinds of policy data. But it has over 4,000 indicators related to demographics, real estate, crime, money & income, jobs, education, energy, and public investments.  Pretty amazing!  Go to OpenLeft to see a few examples of what you can do with it.  Better yet, go straight to Policy Map and view the demo.

For those of you involved in public policy: note that those willing to pay for “Standard” or “Premium” subscriptions get enhanced functionality.  Those in the latter category can even upload their own data and plot them on the maps.

Click here to read this article by Jack Tierney on Sense and Nonsense on July 3rd, 2008.