There are many websites that purport to map crime. Whether any of them are useful for any other city, I can’t say, but none of them mapped Stockton’s crime either accurately or well.
The only one I knew that did so reliably and totally was SJCrime.com, the result of a cooperative arrangement between the Record and the Stockton Police Department. There were occasionally errors, and its data was usually at least a month old, but it was, as far as I could tell, a near-complete account of reported crime in Stockton. But it’s going away soon.
SpotCrime, linked in the first paragraph, just crawls through the web, sucks information out of news items and then maps it, as far as Stockton goes, anyway. Someone sent me a link to the site ages ago, and I quickly realized it hadn’t mapped any crime we hadn’t reported. Odd, that, because we don’t even report all the burglaries, assaults and robberies that occur. (Why? There isn’t room or time.)
But this CrimeMapping.com is quite good. The map is based on data from the Stockton Police Department, and it’s timely (extremely) and accurate.
What should you be using it for? Watching burglaries.
The previous link is a map of all the burglaries reported in Stockton between Jan. 19 and 25. (You can change the date range and the crimes mapped.) At a glance, I can see there have been no burglaries in my neighborhood in the past week, so I can safely turn off my alarm and leave my door unlocked when I go to work!
