Spotting Crime

In what served as one half of Richard and Matthew's collaborative project exploring the art of mapping, Richard used information gathered from http://www.spotcrime.com/ in order to tag his neighborhood's street signs/poles with translucent decals representative of all crimes (assaults, thefts, and shootings) that had taken place througout the community from 3/11/11 (the date of Japan's recent catastrophic earthquake) through the end of March.

The following information was written in permanent ink in the surface of each tag:

a) type of crime committed at that location (assault/theft/shooting)

b) the date the crime was reported to the police

c) the time the crime was reported to the police

d) "spotcrime.com"

Each adhesive tag was cut and shaped according to the type of crime it represented. These shapes were in accordance to the logos chosen on http://www.spotcrime.com/ and were as follow:

a) Assault (outline of a fist)

B) Shooting C) Theft

A map of all the crimes tagged in this project can be found at:

http://www.spotcrime.com/#4905%20N%20Glenwood%20Avenue%2C%20Chicago

In total, there were 22 assault tags, 12 theft tags, and 1 shooting tag. Before setting the tags, a route was created by laying out each tags as they were were seen in the map from the spotcrime website. The backside of each tag was then given a number corresponding to numbers written on a printed out map of the targeted neighborhood. This allowed Richard (the tagger) to easily retrieve the correct tag for each location during his route.

The tags were all placed on non-black poles (steel, yellow, green) so that the black, stencilled text on the tags could easily be read once posted. Because spotcrime fails to disclose precise street addresses (only the block in which the crime occurred) the tags were placed on poles in the general location of the crime they represented. All tags were placed at approximately 6 feet from the base of the pole on which they were placed.

Five days following the placing of the tags, all of those that were revisited were still in place and remained as legible as when they were first set.