NAMPA, Idaho — If you live or work in Nampa, there's a new resource the community can access to find out where crime is happening. It comes in the form of a crime map, and it stems from the Nampa Police Department's effort to be more transparent.
The Nampa Police Department unveiled its new publicly shared crime map last week.
“One of the features of our crime map is… the option to submit a tip with that it allows our community members where they may have been in the area, but maybe they didn't want to call us,” Brandon Feldman with Nampa Police Department said.
He has been assigned to the real time crime center, which monitors crime happening in the community and works closely with analysts.
“Say we have a shooting somewhere in our city, we'll be able to pull up cameras in that area, and hopefully gather intel for our patrol officers as they're on the way to that call and then we can also relay that information to them, hopefully, they can potentially pick up a suspect if they fled from the scene on the way to the call,” Feldman said.
They use cameras that read license plates throughout the city.
“Which can be helped us with locating stolen vehicles wanted subjects, missing persons,” Feldman said. “We can move our traffic cameras into say a parking lot where there might be a robbery happening or something going on in that parking lot, we can pull those cameras up and start giving updates to our officers.”
That information gathered will then make its way to the crime map. People who live in the community are then able to look at the map and see where the crime is happening. The map updates every 24 hours and shows all the calls that happen throughout the city.
He added, it will show the general location where a crime happens but not the specific address of a person's home.
“We really care about person's privacy person's privacy,” Feldman said.
The features are also anonymous.
“It gives the incident number, our police department, and then the type of call that it was on this case, it was a threatening call it doesn't say who the victim is,” Feldman said.” Also, we're not going to post sensitive calls so, like sexual assaults, stuff like that, that's not going to be posted on here for people's privacy.”
The crime map is also free.
“I encourage members of our community that if they if they see something, and they know that something occurred in their neighborhood, I would highly encourage them to submit these tips because it helps our officers solve cases in a timely manner,” Feldman said.
Nampa Police told KTVB, this crime map is part of their commitment to transparency and community safety. They add, people reached out to them and asked for a way to see what kind of crime was happening in their neighborhood.
Last month, Nampa Police launched a new camera registry program.
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