Henrico citizens now have easy access to criminal-incident information, arrest reports and other crime data.
The information is online at: http://www.co.henrico.va.us/police .
To search arrests, the citizen types in a specific date or a range of dates. To narrow a search, a crime category can be selected.
Mel Solomon, who leads a neighborhood watch group, said they now can discover when, where and what types of crimes are being committed in their community. They can also learn who has been arrested, where they live and the specific charge, according to the Times-Dispatch.
“It tells us what’s occurring in the neighborhood and where we need to pay attention,” Solomon said.
Until recently, arrest records were easily available only to the news media.
The ACLU’s Virginia executive director liked it that way.
“Henrico County seems to have forgotten that there are two legitimate interests here — the privacy rights of individuals and the need for open government — and those interests need to be balanced,” said Kent Willis.
“There is no question that the names of persons who have been arrested should be part of the public record,” Willis added. “But there is a big and obvious difference between your name being on file at the courthouse and being on the Internet.”
Several police agencies in Virginia provide daily or weekly crime summaries online, but none give the public a chronological, day-to-day accounting, in a searchable database, of whom they arrest. Fairfax County police have posted a weekly list of arrestees in alphabetical order but the information is static, unsearchable and hard to read.
Virginia open-government advocates hailed the Henrico move, calling it one of the best in the state for public access to crime data.
Frosty Landon, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, contrasted Henrico’s efforts with those chronicled in the ’90s by state newspapers that tested access to public records statewide.
The newspapers found that “police chiefs and sheriffs just had an abysmal compliance rate [for releasing crime reports] — something like 15 or 16 percent,” Landon said.
The ACLU’s Willis worries that posting arrestees’ names on the Internet could result in “the punishment of innocent people.”
To Henrico’s credit, Willis noted, the county has built into the site some important limitations. The names of arrestees remain online only for 30 days, and the database cannot be searched by name.
The system was designed to automatically purge an arrestee’s record 30 days after his or her arrest, to avoid violating a state law that prohibits law-enforcement agencies from releasing criminal-history information, said Henrico police spokesman Lt. Doug Perry.
In addition, Virginia’s Freedom of Information law mandates that information related to criminal arrests should be released “reasonably contemporaneous to the time of the offense,” he said.
The criminal-offense and arrest reports are transferred to the police Web site once a day. However, Steve Guthrie, the Henrico information-technology manager who helped create the police Web pages, said there are plans to update the data “on a more timely basis,” possibly every three or four hours.
The crime-information pages consistently have been top draws on the Henrico police Web site. The page containing searchable criminal-offense information ranks second in user “hits” (5,280 in September), behind only the police department’s home page, police Webmaster Al Harper said. The arrest-report page ranks fifth out of the site’s 625 pages, getting 4,942 hits in September.
Site users can access the names of Henrico arrestees with several easy-to-use search fields. Arrestees can be found by a range of dates, a specific day of the week or by crime category. In some cases the arrest record is cross-referenced with a criminal-incident report that also can be viewed.
Users can also learn the identities of every adult arrested for specific crimes, such as robbery or assault, in a given period.
The full name of each suspect is listed, along with their ages at the time of arrest and the block number of their street address. An arrestee’s date of birth and specific address are excluded because of privacy concerns.
“It’s being used quite extensively,” Solomon said of the crime data. “The block captains, the people that work with me in my neighborhood, they use it all the time. And they call me to say, . . .Did you know [that a crime occurred] on such-and-such a street and at such-and-such a time?’ So we keep in touch that way. We know what’s going on, who’s in trouble and who needs to be watched.”
RichmondCrime.org
Want to see where the latest crime in Richmond occurred? You can Google it — sort of.
Using public information from the Richmond Police Department, RichmondCrime.org uses Google maps to pinpoint locations of crimes. The Web site — independent from the police department — was developed by PharrOut LLC, a Richmond-based Web-development company. Web surfers can also type an address into the search box to check what types of crime occurred at specific times, dates and locations.
— Times-Dispatch