Madison Robbery Mapping and Lamenting Reductions in MPD Information Access

When I recently learned that Escape Java Joint on Williamson Street was robbed it struck a familiar nerve (in multiple people). The Williamson/Atwood region has been through a rough 2007 with multiple robberies, car break-ins, and burglaries. For example, Roman Candle, Mermaid Cafe, and Jenifer Street Market were all robbed this year (on the heels of the neighborhood beat cop being pulled from the area more than a year ago). I thought it would be interesting to pop the police robbery incident reports for all of Madison into Google maps and see if any trends popped up. The result? Well, it doesn't really say much. Part of the problem is that I am relying completely on the incident reports that the Madison Police Department deems worthy enough to be posted on the website. The MPD website, even after a slight upgrade a couple of months ago, is sorely lacking when it comes to communication with the public (for one, the search function in the incident report section doesn't work). In August they said that they planned to begin working harder at making information available to the public. The Wisconsin State Journal reported on December 7 that local media has been having an increasingly hard time getting information from the police - potentially in violation of Wisconsin Freedom of Information laws (ironically, Wisconsin was the first state to pass an open records law).

The suggestion in the article that too much information was being made available to the public is aggravating. As a cub reporter in Willimantic, Conn. part of my weekly job was going around to police departments and looking at the logs. These logs included arrest and call records and the departments, from municipal to state, never put up a fight in handing the material over (that isn't to say departments had a perfect record in handing certain documents over to the press). If they weren't busy updating the info it was readily handed over. The MPD cite concerns over revealing sensitive information. In Connecticut if a report included sensitive information, such as a sexual assault where the victim should not be identified, that would be blacked out. Additionally, in the call records the names of those who made the call were always blacked out.

Providing such information to the public and the press not only helps the police by adding an extra set of eyes that may be able to help identify trends, but it also builds a sense of trust and respect. Plus, it is simply our right as citizens to know what is going on around us. Just check Newspapers Inc. v. Breier:

[quote] "We hold as a matter of law that the harm to the public interest in the form of possible damage to the arrested persons' reputations does not outweigh the public interest in allowing inspection of the police records which show the charges upon which arrests were made. The police blotter shall be open for inspection by the public at any time when the custodian's office is open for business and the 'arrest list' or the police 'blotter' is not actually being used for the making of entries therein." [/quote]

Hopefully 2008 will see a more open approach by the Madison Police Department.

Robbery trends based on MPD incident reports for the last six months are mapped below.

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