City of Topeka Services

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Reduce crime and improve public safety. LexisNexis’s public crime map, Community Crime Map, connects law enforcement with the community to reduce crime and improve public safety. Crime mapping helps the public get a better idea of the crime activity in their area so they can make more informed decisions about how to stay safe.

Community Crime Map goes beyond crime mapping by automatically alerting the public about recent crime activity and by improving communication between the public and law enforcement through anonymous tips. Community Crime Map empowers the public to make better decisions about crime by putting the same technology used by law enforcement to analyze and interpret crime activity into the hands of the public.

Sources of information

Community Crime Map compiles crime data and other information from law enforcement agencies to make it easier for the public to stay informed about crime. Data in Community Crime Map is provided directly from each law enforcement agency. Because Community Crime Map is just the public side of a much more robust crime data sharing and analysis system for law enforcement, we take every step to ensure that the data is of the highest quality and accuracy. To uphold these quality standards, LexisNexis works with each agency to set up an automated feed of the data from their crime database into the database. Receiving the data directly from each law enforcement agency ensures that the data is always up to date, accurate and complete.

How does it work

Law enforcement agencies keep detailed records about each incident that occurs in their jurisdiction. When an incident happens, the officer that responded to the incident writes a detailed report with information about the event including the location, people involved, related vehicles and other useful information. This information is stored in large, secure databases within each law enforcement agency. Between departments, these databases can vary in structure and complexity, and even the data itself can follow different standards to describe the event. This can make it difficult for two neighboring cities to share crime data and benefit from being able to analyze events and offenders that cross city boundaries. LexisNexis’s regional data sharing products help centralize and standardize this information into a national database of crime to improve regional data sharing and analysis. Community Crime Map takes this data, cleans it to protect victim privacy, and displays it to the public so citizens can be aware of the events that occur in their area and take action to stay safe.