Philadelphia's Serious Crime Database Gets Makeover
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – A city worker has taken the police department's serious crime database and turned it into an interactive website.
When the Philadelphia Police Department digitized its list of more than 60,000 David Walk perked up.
Walk designs software for the city and he was able to quickly develop a website called "PHL Crime Mapper" that allows users to drill down into those statistics.
"You click and drawn essentially an area in Philadelphia and once you close that area it will zoom in and show you all the crimes for the date rings that you selected; all the serious crimes that the Philadelphia Police Department has released," says Walk.
Walk believes it's important to know everything about what's going on in your neighborhood. He's still working out some bugs and says new versions will be even more user friendly.