 The South Portland Police Department is now offering a free online crime mapping program, Raids Online, connects law enforcement with the public by letting them view current information on local criminal activity. Tom talked with Lieutenant Frank Clark about how this new service works. Thanks for joining us again, Frank, to talk a little more about the exciting things happening at the South Portland Police Department. Yeah, I appreciate having you. So we're here to talk about this online mapping that's available for South Portland. Could you describe it a little bit? Yeah, a couple of weeks ago we just released it to the public. What it is is we've partnered with a company called Bear Analytics. They offer this online web-based application called Raids Online. And it's a, if I can editorialize for a minute, it's a really cool tool for the public to use. It really will allow the public the opportunity to get online, and in a map, kind of a visual depiction, will show them where the crime is happening in the city, if they're interested in their specific neighborhood and where the crime is happening there. They can narrow it in and zero in on that particular area. And again, it really gets the information out to the public, which is, you know, I think where that needs to be. How does that help in the enforcement of law in doing your job? Yeah, I think what we're hopeful to see is that the public having that awareness of where the crime's happening, if they know that there's a series of residential burglaries in their neighborhood, car breaks that may be happening, that they're going to be more aware, they're going to be more vigilant, and hopefully they're going to be more apt to call the police department if they see something suspicious going on in their neighborhood. So we do anticipate this being something that, another way for us to partner with the community to make sure we can kind of hopefully reduce crime. How did this come about? Have you seen this happen, or has somebody looked at this in other communities and seen what happened as a result of it? Yeah, there have been, I believe, six communities in the state of Maine so far that have partnered with RAIDS and offered that service, spoke with people in those other communities, and they have found it to be a benefit. The other thing that the actual application does that is beneficial for the residents is it will email them information, whether they can set it up to do it daily, weekly, or monthly. So if they live at a particular address, they type in their home address, maybe it's their business address, they can put that information in, and if there's crime reports that are being taken within a certain distance from that address, the system will actually email them the information on that report. Wow, that's pretty incredible. My first impression hearing about it is in one way it's really good to have that information out there and available to the general public, but isn't there any fear or worry that people might become overly worried about seeing where the crime is and how much crime is actually happening? There are some trade-offs. Part of that is the information is limited. The information that you get when you look at that is the date and time that the crime report was taken, the nature of the crime report, whether it's a theft or a burglary, something along those lines. In fact, the matter is simple and is a very safe community. We just feel that the information that will be provided by this application will be more of a benefit to the community than a hindrance. The other thing that we did take into account during this is there are certain crime types that we do not upload or report to online, such as sex crimes and things of that nature, where the other thing that the application does is it doesn't give a specific address of where a particular crime is. So again, we're trying to maintain the anonymity of the victims that are reporting these crimes too. Right, and then also there are reports of crimes that are not actually adjudicated and convicted. So that doesn't necessarily mean that those crimes actually took place or that you know who the perpetrator, is that correct? Correct, there's no information that relates to who the victim is. If there is a suspect or a person who was arrested, that information is not made available as part of this application. This is just what you're saying, it's just the fact that a report of a crime was taken at that particular date and time. And have you had any feedback so far from the general public on this? What's been the response or is it too early to tell? It's probably too early, I did get some initial feedback from people that took a look at the application when we initially released it to the public, thought that it was a really great tool, really something informative. Some of them were actually business people in the city that were looking in to see whether or not they could actually bring that into their communities where they live outside of the city. So we're looking forward to what it may bring. Yeah, it's a great, another example of how technology can be used to really enhance people's lives and especially the operations of the government body. Well, if people wanted more information about this, obviously, all of it's online and anybody can access it, but could you just give where people can get that information and get it? Yeah, yeah. Either at Raids Online, which is www.raidsonline.com and Raids is R-A-I-D-S, or right on our website, we have a link to it, and our website is www.cellpolyn.org-slash-pd. Well, great. Thank you very much for joining us. That's a very interesting program. Thanks.