Perhaps when your local crime maps appears you'll go online and have a nose at your local crime rate.
However, there is no evidence that this fall in crime is in any way related to publishing crime maps.
The use of crime maps in Chicago first brought the concept to wide attention, and their use in the US has inspired British politicians.
Police were also told more detailed crime maps would be published to enable the public to challenge them on their performance at local beat meetings.
Some police departments are running crime maps on their home pages.
The public needed more "feedback and interaction" when using services, such as crime maps and giving parents online details of children's progress at school, he added.
Boris Johnson, in the lead up to the London mayoral elections, announced his plan to publish "New York-style" crime maps of London, which have just gone online.
The reform panel pushed the Camden Police Department to create computerized crime maps, and to change police beats and shifts to focus on the worst areas and times.
We will require the publication of crime data online in an open way so that communities can build their own crime maps, see what crimes are being committed, where and at what time and hold their local police to account if they're not doing something about it.
The jury heard from crime scene investigators and have been shown maps of the area where Mr Moffatt was walking when he was stabbed.
BBC: Norman Moffatt murder trial hears of alleged confession
That, in turn, has set off a race among companies like SpotCrime to turn crime data into mash-ups of maps and analytics, producing charts and graphs in Web-friendly formats.
FORBES: Colin Drane wants to be the kingpin of criminal data.
Marion Fitzgerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that when new police and crime commissioners were elected from next year, the demand for resources would be "very much skewed" towards areas where crime or anti-social behaviour was shown on the maps to be prevalent.
Whether these maps will have sufficient caveats explaining why they may not show the real picture of local crime, and whether busy online visitors will have the time to really get to grips with statistics, remains to be seen.
He ends his book with a blast of cartographical analysis, and suggests that weather maps have created the template for other representations of volatile geographic phenomena such as the incidence of crime and disease.
应用推荐