The Brooklyn Paper’s most-loved column — the weekly Police Blotter — enters the modern age this week with a new feature that gives you maps of all the crimes in our coverage area, allowing you to search block-by-block, crime-by-crime or precinct-by-precinct.
Has there been a burglary on your block?
What’s the latest on the iPhone bandit?
Where are the hotspots for car theft?
It’s all now one click away.
“This is the greatest innovation in crime reporting since the police scanner,” said Brooklyn Paper Editor Gersh Kuntzman.
The system is easy to use. Just find the words “Police Blotter” on the left navigation bar on our home page, www.BrooklynPaper.com. Then, choose the following options:
• Click “Crime database” for chronological write-ups of all the crimes from all the precincts that we cover.
• Click “MAP: Last 10 days” for the searchable map of all the recent crimes in those precincts.
• Click “MAP: Last 30 days” or “MAP: Last 90 days” for more weeks of mayhem.
Once inside the database, you can customize your search any way you wish. If you’re only interested in burglaries, click the word “burglary” in the categories list. If you want to search for crimes on a certain date, click on that date in the calendar. If you’re only interested in assaults in Park Slope, click on “assaults” and “Park Slope.”
Add crime types or neighborhoods by clicking on their names in the bar. Take away categories merely be deselecting them from the “current search” menu.
“It’s so simple and fun to use that I’m constantly clicking on the map,” Kuntzman said. “It’s yet another great BrooklynPaper.com Web feature that combines the street reporting of my staff and the Net savvy of our Webmaster Sylvan Migdal. He’s won awards, you know.”
