Use this app to track crimes in your neighborhood — and the arrests that follow

The new crime app from Christopher Sawyer, the civic hacker who’s a bit, er, rougher around the edges than, say, the Code for Philly crew, made us turn our head.
At first, PhillyBlotter seems like your average crime app, like Dave Walk’s PHL Crime Mapper that got adopted by the Police Department or the Inquirer’s stunner, but what takes it a step further is how it’s paired up with arrest data from Sawyer’s CourtWatch tool. CourtWatch has been around for a year and is similar to PhillyRapSheet, the arrest tracker that has since been shut down. The crime and courts data mashup means that you can find out if someone’s been arrested for a crime.
Another notable feature? You can get push notifications for violent crimes in your neighborhood. (Which, to be honest, sounds bleak. Reminds us of this app that notifies you every time someone gets killed by the police, which our sister site Technically Brooklyn reported on.)
The app is available for Android and iOS. It costs $4.99.
Download for Android
Download for iOS
Sawyer has long built apps to make city data more accessible, often with an activist-y bent: he built the ZBABot, which culled Zoning Board information, and a map of tax delinquents. He said he built PhillyBlotter because he was providing crime reports to a handful of neighborhood associations, like the Olde Richmond Civic Association, and it was getting unwieldy. Since Sawyer knew how to access crime and arrest data, he had turned into a “human search engine,” he said.
“Hopefully with this app I’ll never get asked to figure out the name of a drug dealer living in a house nearby an upset neighbor ever again,” he wrote to us via Facebook.
About 130 Philadelphians, including the Olde Richmond Civic Association’s board members, beta tested the app, he said.
He hopes the app can arm people with information, empower them to ask better questions and hold police accountable in that way — all goals of the open data movement that drove, among other datasets, the release of city crime data in 2012.
In a blog post announcing the app’s launch, he wrote:

For instance, if a rash of burglaries is happening in your neighborhood, you’ll be able to see it right away. It might prompt you to ask more detailed and pointed questions at the next police representative that comes to your community group meetings. Is there a pattern to these burglaries? Is it just the same people hitting a bunch of different properties or is it different people each time? What can we do to deter it? You get the picture.

He also worked with community members to develop a neighborhood map for the app, a project he took very seriously.
“It took almost as long to write the app as it did to create a neighborhood map of the city that would meet the expectations of most Philly residents, given how visceral people get when the media misreports what neighborhood a crime is located in,” he said.