Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime: ""
Fascinating story about a Google Maps powered wiki that lets Brazilian citizens report crime.
"Like many in the city, I was hesitant about contacting the police. For some there is a feeling that there is little point; for others a general distrust of them.
But this under-reporting of crime is one of the motivations behind a new interactive website called Wikicrimes, created by Professor Vasco Furtado from the University of Fortaleza in northern Brazil."
The police don't like it, and I can see potential for abuse (potential property developer fakes crime reports to lower propert values? Cautious residents fake report to pressure more policing in their area?), but its subverting the lack of official statistics from the Brazilian authorities on the true landscape of their society.
Sites like the archetypal Chicago Crime map, where Google Maps is powered by official stats, providing simple geographical interfaces have been around for a while, of course, but this is the first I've seen where people populate the data themselves?
I think this is an incredibly positive site - I'd like to see one for Manchester. At the moment, I'm just grateful for TrafficJammr, which uses Google Maps to show realtime traffic.
Mind you, how long will it be until I'm in a new part of town, whipping out my iphone's googlemaps function to look for local information and seeing recent crime stats overlaid on my current location? Not sure how I feel about that, actually - we could become an overly paranoid nation of gps twitchers!
Original link via the My Society mailing list.
