Citizens put on detective caps at Chicagocrime.org

Chicago has a multitude of news media outlets that notify people of major crimes, but in a city this size, it’s unlikely that the media will report every single incident. That’s where Chicagocrime.org comes in.

"I thought the site would be a nice public service," says Adrian Holovaty, a native Chicagoan with a background in journalism who developed the non-profit website.

Chicagocrime.org is designed to inform Chicago residents about recent crimes all over the city. It allows site viewers to search for crimes in specific crime locations, types, wards, zip codes and date ranges. Viewers can even create routes with the help of interactive city maps.

Through a process called screen scraping, the website downloads reported crimes once a day from Citizen ICAM, a site maintained by the Chicago Police Department. It then allows Internet users to browse through the crimes with Google Maps, creating an interactive and customized search process. Chicagocrime.org allows Chicago residents to learn about crimes occurring in their area that they may otherwise never hear about.

"I’m always working on projects, mostly little scripts that improve sites for personal use ... Chicagocrime.org is this on a bigger scale."

Holovaty says he does not include advertising on the site so that chicagocrime.org can continue to function as an intellectual service and that he plans to add more features to chicagocrime.org in the near future.

The next step for the site, according to Holovaty, is to integrate Chicago Transit Authority bus routes so that viewers can search for crimes along these routes.

"I plan to deduce the CTA route by looking at the location of the crime," said Holovaty. He also intends to add a video map to make the site even more interactive. This will allow viewers to enter search parameters and watch the map play over a certain time period.

Chicagocrime.org recently won the grand prize in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. This $10,000 award is given by J-Lab, which looks for "novel approaches to journalism that spur non-traditional interactions and have an impact on a community," according to J-Lab's website.

"Thanks to the prize money, I can afford bigger and better servers [for the site] to add extra features that I have previously avoided," said Holovaty. "I’m really excited."

With all the success of chicagocrime.org, Holovaty has been contacted by other police departments with requests for websites for their departments and has started working with them as well. He is also currently working on a follow-up site to chicagocrime.org that will provide local data about Chicago -- though he says he can’t reveal more details yet.

"[Chicagocrime.org] is just the first step in the Chicago media empire," he said.