UCrime supplies visuals to campus-area crime statistics

The popular, city-specific site SpotCrime.com launched the new university-specific website in early August to offer a database of up-to-date crime statistics for public viewing. A registration feature allows anyone and everyone to report crimes online.

Some university authorities have expressed concern about the website's capacity for abuse and question its reliability.

"Looking at this website in the context of exploitation, what would prevent you or I from making 150 crime reports?" said, Stan Skipworth, University Police chief. "It brings up a lot of questions."

Who and where these crime reports are sent from and how many can be sent out per user, is not mentioned on the site.

Skipworth said he is worried that students might get the wrong idea about the site and fail to report a crime to police first. Failure to do so would mean evidence needed to investigate that crime would be lost at the crime scene where police could have taken the report, had the UCrime user not run home to post the crime online instead. Investigation is only ensured when a crime is reported to police, and the website will not call the police for you, Skipworth said.

Skipworth said reporting a crime online could pose several problems, but he also recognizes the opportunity the site gives to better inform people about what is going on in their community.

Though these crime statistics were already made available through other sources, such as the University Police's main website, UCrime will offer these statistics with interactive maps showing crime patterns.

The website also offers features such as live mobile and e-mail crime updates.

Greg Kastner, UCrime business developer, said UCrime aims for "universities across the country to have a better resource for crime on their campus." Keeping students "better informed about what's going on around them," Kastner said, is UCrime's goal.

As the site develops its database of approximately 200 colleges and universities across the United States, Kastner said UCrime will try and connect with each campus and their police department. UCrime hopes to partner with these schools in some way, if not solely for the exchange of crime information.

UCrime has yet to contact CSULB.

The Clery Act — passed in 1990, and formerly titled the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act — already requires college and university police to release statistics and reports about local crime information to the public. It is the database UCrime gets its information from in addition to citizens' reports.

The statistics on UCrime are not current, but up to four months old. Kastner said that will change by the end of September 2008. The site will eventually offer live updates, and will continue to offer access to reports for other areas and schools. Students interested in moving will be able to track the crime rate.