Neighbor to Neighbor

By: Rich Kane

Time was, when someone got arrested, and you wanted to see that person’s booking mug shot, you usually had to go to the police station and put in a request to a public information officer. But to readers of the Columbia Daily Tribune’s data mapping site, Neighborhoods (neighborhoods.columbiatribune.com), those mug shots are now just a click away.

As is information on open houses, crimes in progress, fire and ambulance calls, restaurant inspections, and much more, most delivered in real time, in either an infinite scroll format or on a map with incident markers which pepper a Google map of the central Missouri city.

Live since March, Neighborhoods has the feel of a hyperlocal Facebook, a tool that Tribune president and general manager Andy Waters says fulfills his newspaper’s mission of keeping government entities as transparent as possible, as well as being a conduit for the public to know what’s going on.

“We’ve done a decent job over the years of printing public records information, like arrests and fire reports, but being able to present it on a map that you can visualize, people are able to make more sense out of it,” said Waters. “And reader reaction has been great. People really haven’t had access to something like this before. They like going into their neighborhood and getting a snapshot of activity.”

Neighborhoods was built with the help of a $90,500 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, using the open-source OpenBlock software the foundation helped develop. The site is currently free, but Waters said that at some point, certain premium content could be put behind a paywall.

Most of the information posted to Neighborhoods is pulled in via RSS feeds and servers. The difference between this and other similar sites is that it is entirely customizable, said Waters.

“You can see real estate data and crime data in real time,” he said. “We’re really aggregating data in a way that hasn’t been done before, and it’s also an experiment to see what kind of data people are finding useful.”

The site is also completely customizable. Readers can search for incidents happening all over Columbia County, or break it down further by searching for interesting items via zip code, ward, or school district. Types of incidents are also broken up—you can choose to view only restaurant inspections or fire calls, or just what the University of Missouri campus police have been up to lately.

People can also post personal messages, including tweets and photos, which can pad the site out a bit. A recent scroll-through revealed more than a few seemingly pointless selfies.

But the most popular features so far with the public? Waters cites two: the open house listings … and those mug shots. Apparently, in these Neighborhoods, it’s highly entertaining to see what trouble your neighbors have gotten themselves into.