In 2013 Dallas Police Department was recognized for being social media friendly. Making crime reports available online makes them more media friendly.

In 2013 Dallas Police Department was recognized for being social media friendly. Making crime, arrest and incident reports available online makes them more media and public friendly, in general.

Neighborhood crime watch groups and reporters were unable to access Dallas police crime reports in the usual way, via an online database, during the past couple months. Police announced late last week that the new system is up and running.

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According to the announcement, “the Dallas Police Department launched its new Records Management System which is used to house offense and arrest records. This website represents a filtered version of the data contained within that application for the purpose of the sharing of non-sensitive data with the citizens of Dallas. This data should not be used for statistical purposes as it only represents data that is releasable to the General Public.”

That means details about crimes involving juveniles, sexual attack victims’ names and other protected information is filtered out of the reports; any stats drawn from the available public information would be incomplete — this is no different from before, as far as we can tell.

There are some extras — the new system offers access to city council crime reports by district, community prosecutor (code enforcement) reports, weekly crime statistics by beat or sector among other data.

A weekly CompStat report offers 14 day, 28 day, and year-to-date comparisons. “Numbers are based on the date of offense occurrence. These part 1 offenses are broken down by Police Divisions and by Watch 1, 2, and 3 (Midnight, Days, and Evening shift),” administrators note.

Check it out for yourself.