Crime Crime Statistics

SPOTCrime Open Crime Standard (SOCS)

by Colin Drane

SOCS is a standard for police agencies to publish public crime data uniformly. It requires fields such as date and time (in ISO format), locale, and incident type

Website Documentation Example Contact

Assessment

Open License Yes
Transferable to Other Jurisdictions Yes

Catapult is a complimentary, open source software that stores the data in CSV files and makes it easier for smaller police departments with less resources to publish the data
Stakeholder Participation No

Created privately by a citizen developer
Consensus-Based Governance No

Comments can be made on SOCS GitHub page, but specification appears to be maintained by one entity
Extensions Yes

SOCS specifies a list of required fields, but most users of SOCS include additional fields and descriptions
Human Readable Yes

Standard utilizes identifiers and organizes data by type of crime
Machine Readable Yes

Acceptable formats according to the SPOTCRIME standard are XML, RSS feed, CSV, RDF, JSON, TXT, XLS(X), and KML
Requires Up-To-Date / Real-Time Data Yes

Standard dictates data be updated on a daily basis
Metadata No

Standard doesn't explicitly require metadata. However, many examples of SOCS implementation include a zip file containing metadata