City of Bloomington, MN BPD tutorials, 28 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: Community Crime Map Overview

Description

BPD Crime Prevention Coordinator Katie Zerull gives an overview of CommunityCrimeMap.com.

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Hello, everyone and welcome. My name is katie zerrell and I'm the crime prevention coordinator with bloomington police. Today I wanted to give you an overview of a wonderful resource. That's available to you in the community called the community crime map.

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The website for this is communitycrimemap.com, and I'm going to give you a brief overview of how to access the map and the great features that are within it and how you can sign up for crime alerts as well.

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Have you ever wondered um if you've seen a police car in a neighborhood, and you thought I wonder what happened? I wonder if a crime occurred. This is a great resource, then that you can look um typically within 24 hours. The reports are populated if a crime has occurred and get more information about that situation.

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You're wanting to know a little bit more about what crime happens in the neighborhood where you live or where you work. You can also find that information here and if you find value in having crime reports emailed to you, you also do that through this website.

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We believe this is a wonderful website for the community, because the more informed a community is on crime activity, the better decisions one can make on how to stay safe.

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So you can access this map by either going directly to the webpage, which again is communitycrimemap.com or you can access this through the bloomington police department website, which you can find through city of bloomington and then go under the police page.

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On the left hand side, you will see an area that I've indicated here with the red arrow that says crime, map statistics and arrest reports once you click that it will bring you to the page, you'll scroll down, just a touch- and you will see this title about the crime map- says a little bit about how it's important to stay informed and how this map is used to connect law enforcement with the people they serve and the more educated you are, the better.

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You can take steps to protect yourself and enhance quality of life and safety in the neighborhoods and places that you work.

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So, for example, you would just click right on that link or go to the web page, and once we do that, it's going to pull up the crime map here. It's loading for me.

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So here we are on the map itself and once you get to this page you're just going to want to select minnesota and from there you can select bloomington.

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So this gives you a bit of an overview of what the map looks like in general, but now I'm going to show you some key features that you can do within this map.

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You can put in a specific address so, for example, I'll just put in our city of bloomington address for the police department and that will show here on the map, an indicator there's a little um red circle here. That indicates where, on the map um based on that address and it'll, bring you to that area of the map. So from here I can do a number of things. I can select the date range of what data I want to know. So I'm going to look at.

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Let's just go from september 1st until today, so I changed this from september. 1St has today's end date populated here of october. 27Th from here you can click on events and in events. You can select the things that you want the map to show you so, for example, if I just deselect all of these, it will clear my map.

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If I say one have all of these shown, I can hit select all and they all will populate on the map, so there's a wealth of data information within here. So for this example, let's say I want to look at motor vehicle theft, so I'm going to deselect all of these and just select motor vehicle theft.

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So from here on this map, you can see all of the police reports that we have taken are indicated with these green car icons.

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A couple key things to note about this map is that um only data shows on this map.

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If we have in fact taken a police report in bloomington, for it say we get called to an address, I'm just going to pick an example say we get called to normandale community college on report of an auto theft, but ultimately the vehicle was found in a different spot in the parking lot and we were called for service, but we did not take a police report because we did not have an actual crime occurred, so no police report would have been taken in that situation, so that would not be indicated on the map.

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The only things that indicate here are things that we actually have taken police reports. For now there are a couple things that are not on the map due to privacy data requirements, but as a whole, it's going to give you a really good idea about what kind of crimes are occurring and where they're occurring.

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So, for example, um I'm going to just select around on one of these and see if I can pick one of them and find some more information.

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So I'm going to click on this icon over here, and it's going to tell me that it has a police report number indicated here by the ir number bp 0.

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So this is actual police report number, which is helpful to know. So if, for example, you live right in this area and you see something on the map- that's concerning, and you want to know more about that. You can contact myself in this role or others in the department or if you're looking for a police report record, you can actually contact the record division to get a copy, and you would indicate what police report number you're looking for, which again is indicated here.

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So this tells us that this was a theft of an auto and it occurred on october 17th and we took the report around 12 p.m. Now the times are not always 100 accurate, because it could be the time that the report was finalized um by the officer, so this time can often vary.

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The public address gives a rough estimate of where that occurred again for data privacy. We don't give the exact, but we give a really good rough estimate. So, for example, this is saying that in indicating it happened on the 1900 block of killaboo drive so great resource here to know about how that works from within this area, you can click on data grid and see the data so up here on the top. um Let me back up a bit.

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We have various ways we can access the same data and just make it more easy to understand.

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The map is, as you see, much more visual, but the data grid as well has some a little bit more helpful data. So if you click on data grid, it's going to show you all of the incident numbers the dates and times where these incidents occurred. The rough addresses it also will indicate a lot of times. We pick up police reports on our map from neighboring communities because they also utilize this mapping software program, so you'll see richfield in this case is indicated as well.

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What's great about it is this map is very user friendly? You can move data around where you would like to view and access it if you'd like to print it and share with neighbors or business members. You can certainly do so.

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You can sort the data by clicking at the top based on date, and it will resort it from now earliest to latest.

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You can also sort then, over here in this category saying we just want bloomington versus the rich field as well.

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I will note that this report has two pages, so our rich field has now moved over to here on that second page.

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So, what's also great about this, is there's also analytics built in within this. If you click on this tab, it's going to give you a great idea of what we're looking at, based on what the map says since we're only looking at motor vehicle thefts. That's what's indicated here, but I'll show an example example of where this will look different.

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Tells you the days of weeks of frequency when these reports were taken.

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It shows you as well as the time times of the day, as well as um giving you this timeline of events, um also great information and resources to have, and the metadata just breaks down um the number by departments.

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So we had 29 records, picked up nine of richfield and one in minneapolis.

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So again, if we're back here on this map, for example, let's say I want to also know about residential burglaries.

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um Let's say I want to know about arson reports um and, let's say uh burglary from motor vehicle, which is thefts that occur from inside a vehicle so say I will collect click a few more of these here now, when I go to my data grid and analytics, it will show that data, but this is where that analytics breaks down of. What's on the map, the majority of those are showing our motor vehicle thefts, which it shows 39..

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If I click on arson, we had two reports and burglary. We have 21 reports, so they're indicated here again. It adds it to these filters, so some great key features that it can be really helpful information to have so now, let's say I'm looking at the entire city based on running the calls based on our bloomington police department address now. In some degree, this can get a bit overwhelming.

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Once we look at the large number of calls, the police department takes on an annual basis, and sometimes maybe it's not as relevant to know, what's happening miles away than maybe right outside your back door. So from here there are some additional features to break down this data to make it more accessible.

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So I have our police department address in here and I'm going to say I want to turn on a buffer and I only want to know what is within a half a mile from this address, and I only want it to show me the events that are within that area.

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So now, when I go back to my data map, it's going to repopulate here looks like it was thinking and maybe I'm lucky we didn't have anything going on in that amount yep. I had to go out to a mile to pick up a few more things there, so I had to adjust my buffer from a half a mile up to one mile.

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So now that I've said here within a mile, we can look again at the same options for us and it'll. Tell me, within one mile of this address that we have a number of reports taken. We had two burglary reports as well as a number of auto thefts.

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Now from here we can look at additional analytics the same as we had before as well.

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So one key thing is: there is a lot of information, and data within this map becomes very useful. I utilize this map almost on a daily basis as well. I also want to point out how you can sign up for crime alerts through this website in the top right hand corner up here, it often gets kind of missed because it's this gray box, that's against this white background.

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um So technically some improvements could be made there to make this easier to find, but right up here in this little box. If you click this sign up for crime alerts, it will pop up a customizable neighborhood watch report.

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So what you can do is fill this information out for the area that you want to have information on, and you can decide what information you want to know about. It's often hard to know you know hey.

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Should I go look at the map today and see if a burglary occurred, where it's much more useful to know when one happens to be notified, we make much better choices when we have accurate information and it's more timely as well so it'd be much better for neighborhoods to know, in fact, when, as a burglary happened versus hearing about them at a point in time when you've decided to go look for it.

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So that's why I really encourage um people to sign up for crime alerts, but a couple things through here I want to mention- is you're just going to fill this basic information out with name and email address and then you're going to put the address that you want to get the information generated from you want to have your select a radius if you want to have from within there how far away from that address, and then here's the important part that you can say tell me daily, weekly or monthly, how you want to receive the crime alert report, and then you want to tell it what you want to hear on those reports.

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A couple key things I want to mention is that I guess I suggest playing around with these features here.

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On the left hand, side before you decide what you want to have on your report, because, for example, if you select all other non-criminal we're going to get a large number and all other criminal, for example, if we click on those, let's just do it on the map once so we're going to do all other criminal and all other non-criminal, and I'm going to remove my buffers, but as a whole, you're going to get quite a few of these throughout the area, and you can zoom in and out of the map too, with your cursor, but you'll see, there's roughly here on this 22 pages, because this really picks up anything with people who have missed a court date.

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They may be trespasses receiving stolen property so granted. There is a lot of great information that is still very useful here, but it is a lot of information. So just keep that in mind when you're asking for reports. If you select these type of areas, you will be getting reports um if you're telling the system to let you know when they happen, you will know almost daily you'll, be getting reports. So just keep that in mind.

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So um back here we're going to click back on our crime alerts and continue to walk through this. So I would pick things that are most important to you that you want to know about and have the most impact on where you live, work or worship, and um you have access then to that data and then from there you're just going to click sign up and the reports will then be sent to you.

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So it's a great resource um with wonderful information, and we here in the police department, are um we encourage you to follow up with us? If you have questions, we are always happy to do so. So if you see something um that is, that concern feel free to reach out and contact us in regard to that incident or police report number indicated on the map or within the data grid, and we can provide you with some additional information or get you in touch with records to get you copies of reports as well.

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So again, great wonderful information here, I highly suggest checking it out the more we know about crime, the better we are to change behavior, improve security share information with others around us, so we're passing on that message of crime, prevention and community connectivity and safety.

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So from there. I just will pull up my contact information again here.

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So if anyone has any follow-up questions after looking at this map and you're stuck or need a little bit, more assistance feel free to reach out to me. My contact information is noted here on the screen. Again, I'm katie zearl the crime prevention coordinator with bloomington police, and you can reach me at.

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952-563-8808 or with my email, kzero bloomingtonmn.gov thanks, so much have a great.

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