Photo courtesy of EveryBlock
 
Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and computer programmer from Chicago, started up chicagocrime.org in 2005. If you’re in the with the tech- or crime-obsessed crowd, you’ve probably seen this site– or stared at it for hours on end. Give or take a few hours.
 
You probably also know that Holovaty has recently expanded his site into the brand new web resource EveryBlock, a hub for neighborhood news from Chicago to New York to San Francisco.
 
Holovaty has created Web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.come and LJWorld.com. So, as you can imagine, he’s a pretty busy guy. But today, this gypsy-guitar playing programmer took a couple of minutes to answer a few questions for Watching the Detectives. Take a look.
 
WTD: Tell me a little bit about chicagocrime.org. Why did you start it? How did you start it?
What kind of response have you gotten from it?
 
AH: I started chicagocrime.org for the fun of it, in May 2005. I’d found the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM site and was blown away by the amount of quality crime data — but I found myself wanting to interact with it in more of a “browse” fashion than a “search” fashion. At the same time, I was part of the early community that was working to figure out how to embed Google Maps on our own sites, so the project was an excuse for me to use mapping on a Web site.
 
The response was overwhelmingly positive, both from residents/users of the site and people outside of Chicago who saw it as an innovative project. It inspired more than a dozen similar sites in other cities around the world, it was named by the New York Times Magazine as one of the year’s best ideas, and it made some waves in the journalism industry, where it was seen as an interesting new form of journalism.
 
WTD: Why did you decide to switch over to EveryBlock?
 
AH: In spring 2007, I received a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to start an experiment with address-specific news — essentially, to create the successor to chicagocrime.org, with more data than just crime and more cities than just Chicago. Thanks to the grant, I have the luxury of working on this project full time, whereas chicagocrime.org was always a side project.
 
It didn’t make much sense to operate both sites, given that EveryBlock provides Chicago crime data too, so I redirected chicagocrime.org to the appropriate EveryBlock pages a couple of weeks ago.
 
WTD: Can you tell me a little about EveryBlock?
 
AH: The concept is, it’s a newspaper for your block. We pull together as much local news we can find — public records, mainstream media reports, plus Webby stuff like Flickr photos — and let you filter it geographically, at an extremely granular level. Every block in Chicago gets its own page, e.g.,
http://chicago.everyblock.com/streets/addison-st/1050-1098w/ .
 
More information is on our “about” page.
 
WTD: What kind of response have you gotten from the changeover?
 
AH: It’s been mostly positive, but any redesign causes its share of anxiety and confusion. People have said they like the wealth of additional data we offer, along with the fact that we now offer e-mail alerts. The main criticism has been that we no longer have a way of finding *only* the crimes on a given block, as we now use a small search radius around each block. But we’re working on fixing that.
 
WTD: Has your site every helped anyone to stop or prevent a crime, or to catch a criminal?
 
AH: I have no way of knowing that for sure, but I think increasing
information and awareness about neighborhood crime has the effect of making a community a bit more safe. What I hear anecdotally is that people use the site to keep tabs on crime in their neighborhood and, in some cases, create reports to take to aldermen to point out specific trends.
 
WTD: Why crime?
 
AH: Because the data was available.
 
WTD: How do you think the advent of the Internet has affected crime reporting/fighting? Does it promote amateur crimefighters? Or merely provide an outlet for armchair sleuths?
 
AH: I think tools like chicagocrime.org and EveryBlock get people more interested in their neighborhoods, which has a positive effect.
 
WTD: Was Django named after Django Reinhardt?
 
AH: Yes. I’m a big Django Reinhardt fan and even attempt to play that
style of music.