OCEAN CITY NJ – A new city map allows neighbors and prospective homebuyers to find out what crimes have been committed in recent months in their neighborhoods.
Call it Mapquest – with burglaries.
The city also signed up for Nixle, a new Twitter-style service that will let the Police Department “tweet” about crime.
In a world increasingly dependent on mobile technology, police are finding they, too, have to be more nimble to do their jobs.
Ocean City’s Police Department paid $1,188 this year to be part of Crime Reports, a mapping service that shows everything from murders to thefts to complaints about yapping dogs.
Police also use a reverse-911 system called Global Connect to warn neighbors about crimes in progress and catch suspects. Police used the system this summer to notify residents along Simpson Avenue when a suspect who robbed a PNC Bank on 34th Street fled down the road on a bicycle.
“It saved officers a lot of time,” police Lt. Steven Ang said. “They didn’t have to stop and answer everyone’s questions about what was going on because the neighbors already knew why they were there.”
The city pays about $10,000 per year for the Global Connect phone service, which uses the 911 system database to inform residents about crimes, impending coastal storms or evacuations, Detective Scott Morgan said. He uses the technology in his role in emergency management on the island.
Anyone can check out the crime maps free of charge. Lower and Middle townships in Cape May County also participate in the service.
Icons for different crimes (“TV” means theft from a vehicle) dot the map. Clicking on the icon reveals a pop-up box with the block address, criminal charge and date of the offense.
Ang said this could be especially useful to residents who sometimes forget to lock their car doors. Seeing a rash of thefts from vehicles illustrated on a map could be a good reminder to lock up, he said.
The department plans to list almost every crime, from murders to sexual assaults. Domestic violence calls will not be included to protect the family’s privacy, Ang said.
Nixle, based in Mount Laurel, Burlington County, offers its texting and e-mail services to police departments and government agencies across the country. This is one-way messaging. The people who sign up get the alerts but cannot reply.
But the advantage is that people who get the messages can trust they are not hoaxes or thinly veiled advertisements, spokeswoman Bonnie Miller said.
“Anybody can pose as an agency using Twitter. With Nixle, the users are authenticated,” she said.
The system has some unexpected advantages.
“In Voorhees, there was a fire at an apartment complex. Somebody who lived there saw the posting on Nixle. They called the apartment complex because they were worried about their dog,” she said.
The dog was fine, but the alert shows how people can keep closer tabs on what is going on in their neighborhoods when they are not there. And in Ocean City, where most of the island’s 23,000 properties sit vacant much of the year, the service could be a good way to keep people informed about intermittent flooding, among other common island issues, Ang said.
“Our dispatch constantly gets calls from people in Pennsylvania when we get storms,” he said.
Police supervisors will learn how to broadcast alerts using that system next week.
So far the systems seem to be living up to expectations, police said.
Some media studies in the 1980s suggested that people who watched a lot of television news were more likely to think of the world as a dangerous place. This phenomenon was called mean-world syndrome. Ang said he does not worry that the island’s crime maps will make Ocean City NJ seem more dangerous than it really is.
“It’s better to get the information out than the rumor,” Ang said. “People want to be empowered. They want to know what’s going on, and they’ll find out.”
E-mail Michael Miller:
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