Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Victoria BC – In March of 2011, VicPD launched CrimeReports which allowed citizens to access crime data in a timely manner. At the time, VicPD was the first agency in BC and one of only six in Canada to make this tool available to the public creating a transparent way of seeing crime that is occurring in your neighbourhood.

Since then, CrimeReports has been accessed by over 14,000 people (in 2015 alone) in our community for a variety of reasons.

Recently, due to the vast number of requests for stats, VicPD has directed media outlets, educational institutions and the public to CrimeReports. VicPD has also talked about CrimeReports on social media, encouraging people to go and view crime data for themselves. With this increased focus, we noticed that if the classification of a call is changed after 30 days, it was not updating on the Crime reports map. We have identified a couple of other issues and are currently working on these technical issues with the developer.

For clarity, VicPD has not taken the data or reports down and they are still available on the CrimeReports website. We removed the link from our website when we became aware with inconsistencies with the data. VicPD is working with the vendor and the IT section and will add the link back on the VicPD website when we are more confident with the information in the accuracy and consistency of data.

We also are currently looking at adding more categories to reflect accurately the calls we attend to.

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