Damned If You Don’t, Damned If You Do: Crime Mapping and Its Implications in the Real World

A small but growing North American trend is the publication of maps of crime on the Internet. A number of web sites allow observers to view the spatial distribution of crime in various American cities, often to a considerable resolution, and increasingly in an interactive format. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map crime is a rapidly expanding field that is, as this paper will explain, still in a developmental stage, and a number of technical and ethical issues remain to be resolved. The public right to information about local crime has to be balanced by a respect for the privacy of crime victims. Various techniques are being developed to assist crime mappers to aggregate spatial data, both to make their product easier to comprehend and to protect identification of the addresses of crime victims. These data aggregation techniques, while preventing identification of individuals, may also be inadvertently producing maps with the appearance of ‘greater risk’ in low crime areas. When some types of crime mapping have the potential to cause falling house prices, increasing insurance premiums or business abandonment, conflicts may exist between providing a public service and protecting the individual, leaving the cartographer vulnerable to litigation.