Do you know what’s going on in your neighborhood?

Web site offers one stop shop for local crime statistics

Want to know how many robberies have taken place in the past six months within five miles of your house?

How about how many there were near the house you might move into? Or maybe you want to know if any crimes happened in your neighborhood in the past 24 hours.

Since Alachua County Sheriff’s Office partnered with crimereports.com, these figures and many others are available to citizens with the click of a mouse at no charge.

Together with other local law enforcement agencies, the sheriff’s office announced the new database at a news conference on April 23.

Public information officer Art Forgey said the Web site, crimereports.com, gives citizens the ability to check on crime anywhere in the county, and it covers all jurisdictions, too, meaning that you can check on crimes reported by the sheriff’s office as well as any city police department.

Before the county started using this system, Forgey said it took a lot more time and effort to get the information people would request.

“We would have to pull each address individually from our CAD, which is our computer aided dispatching system.”

It was easy to look up crime stats for one address, he said, but collecting comprehensive data on an entire neighborhood; even a three to five mile radius, for instance, was tedious.

Local law enforcement agencies, especially in Gainesville, tend to get a lot of requests from parents of new university students wanting to know about area crime, Forgey explained. This took up a lot of time before.

Now, with this site, he said, people can go online and get all the information themselves with just a couple of clicks of their mouse, or “They can call us and we’ll do it for them.” Either way, it makes it a lot easier, he said.

When you go to the Web site, you can search by the individual cities of Alachua, Gainesville, High Springs and Waldo or by Alachua County in its entirety to see stats on these cities in addition to Archer, Hawthorne, Micanopy and Newberry.

High Springs was the first in the county to team up with crimereports.com. It has been on the site for two years already.

The goal has been to increase awareness in the community and to provide easily accessible information, said High Springs police chief. Jim Troiano.

Troiano said the system has provided a great option for crime analysis in High Springs that won’t break the budget.

“We can’t afford a crime analyst,” he said. But the database that crimereports.com has set up provides a comparable resource.

The city has been lucky, Troiano said, in that it had local businesses donate funding to pay for the service. The current cost is $1,188 a year. The funding has come from Barber’s Auto Services and Family Discount.

The data for Alachua County as a whole, however, is funded by the sheriff’s office. Being a much larger area to cover than just High Springs, it costs $8,499 a year, according to Forgey.

One of the features Troiano mentioned that he especially likes is that citizens can sign up to get e-mail updates on crime in their area for free.

Forgey said it’s a unique system in that every agency in the county is on board with it; a “one stop shop.”

Go to crimereports.com to check on crime in your neighborhood.