Crime Info?

March 10, 2012 6:28 AM

How can I find out what crimes or police events occur(red) at a given time in New York City?

My son was on a subway that stopped at Times Square around 2AM Thursday night (really Friday morning) for more than an hour. He said police stormed into the cars and the conductor announced that it was an "emergency." All the cars were searched. Then the train was taken out of service. I'm wondering what happened.

This kind of thing has come up before. Only about a month ago I was on a bus when the driver announced that the train running along that street (14th -- the "L" train) was out of service because of an emergency. Then I saw the Medical Examiner's van parked at the Second Ave. subway entrance. I couldn't find out the details until I happened to be reading New York Magazine online, which mentioned that someone was hit by a train. I think they only mentioned it at all because apparently on that day there were several other deaths-by-subway.

But this sort of thing comes up regularly -- some weird "police action" -- and I want to know more. Is there a source for this type of information that is available online?

posted by DMelanogaster to society & culture (6 answers total)

http://gothamist.com/map/

The regular gothamist blog will also cover most subway deaths.
posted by User7 at 6:41 AM on March 10, 2012

Also, Twitter.

Also, same question: http://ask.metafilter.com/198559/Scared-and-mystified
posted by User7 at 6:43 AM on March 10, 2012

http://spotcrime.com/#New%20York%2C%20ny

I use spotcrime, I think Gothamist's map is powered by spotcrime.
posted by fuq at 6:55 AM on March 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

Here in Northern Virginia, every local police force posts an online "Weekly Incident Summary" or "Weekly Crime Summary" --- does the NYPD do something similar? (I know Bloomberg thinks he's running the world's police force --- who the heck believes the New York City police have jurisdiction outside of NYC?!? --- but do they keep information on all local crimes hidden and secret?)
posted by easily confused at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2012

Another search term is "police blotter". Remember that there may be several jurisdictions in play... MTA police, whatever precinct you're in police, etc.
posted by anaelith at 8:37 AM on March 10, 2012

http://nycopendata.socrata.com/ has a giant CSV of all 311 calls since 2008, which sounds close to but not quite what you're looking for. Maybe one of the other datasets has what you need: I didn't look through them all.
posted by d. z. wang at 9:06 AM on March 11, 2012