The City of San Jose has been recognized for years as being one of the safest cities in the nation yet with that stated in 2009 it reported over 3,400 violent crimes and nearly 28,000 property crimes. All would agree that anything we can do to help reduce these numbers will further help our community.
CrimeReports.com an online crime reporting website provides information on police activity, calls for service from both citizens and police officers, as well as the location of registered sex offenders. The San Jose Police Department is one of more than a dozen police departments nationwide that provides Computer Aided Dispatch information directly to CrimeReports.com for mapping and analysis. SJPD has been working with CrimeReports.com since 2007. The CrimeReports.com website allows the citizens of San Jose to view police activity in their neighborhood; everything from traffic violations, assaults, homicides, domestic abuse, to the identification and location of the nearest registered sexual offender.
This year CrimeReports.com released its Neighborhood Central application. Neighborhood Central incorporates social networking into its website with tight integration with Facebook and Twitter. Allowing Facebook users the ability to share, link, and discuss criminal activities in their neighborhood. Neighborhood Central helps creates a virtual neighborhood watch group.
One of the interesting features available with CrimeReports.com Neighborhood Central software is the ability for individuals to identify any public facing video surveillance cameras they may have deployed at their homes or businesses. This information could be of real value to SJPD when investigating crimes or suspicious activities.
Video surveillance systems are an integral part of most business security measures and have become more and more common place for residential applications. Since these system are not public systems they are typically not known to the police department; providing this information could make for a powerful tool.
For more information check out the following websites:
http://www.crimereports.com/
http://www.sjpd.org/
