In the last 30 days, West Mt. Airy has been the most peaceful neighborhood in the city. That is to say, its violent crime rate clocks in at zero, according to a new crime app from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The app, built by Rob Kandel, a web developer at the Inquirer’s parent company Interstate General Media, uses the city’s crime API to sort neighborhoods by both violent and property crime rate. It also offers several visualizations of crime (maps and pie charts), crime trends over the years by neighborhood and demographic data from the census.
The app uses the Inquirer’s neighborhood boundaries, which are updated every few years, Kandel said.
The tool is part of the forthcoming Inquirer.com and will go behind a paywall once that site officially launches (Kandel said this will happen soon but could not be more specific). Philly.com acts as the online destination for both The Daily News and the Inquirer, but soon, both papers will have their own websites with paywalled, subscriber-only content. Philly.com will remain free.
Kandel, who’s been with the Inquirer and Interstate General Media for almost two years, said it took him two to three weeks to build the app. Check out more of his news apps here.
This is hopefully a preview of what’s to come in terms of news apps from both the Daily News and the Inquirer, Kandel said, adding that Interstate General Media already has some upcoming projects in the works. These apps will also be behind a paywall, Kandel said.
It’s the kind of premium content that newspaper dot coms have sought to put behind pay-to-read access, but the question will be if news apps like this are seen as high quality enough to warrant bypassing the growing number of free civic crime mapping tools out there.
Since the city released its crime data and API, we’ve seen several crime apps built by hobbyist hackers, with the exception of that of nonprofit journalism outfit Axis Philly. And the old standard SpotCrime.com, among others, continue to try to find new offerings.
Kandel first demoed the news app at a BarCamp NewsInnovation hackathon planning session last week.
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