SPOKANE, Wash. -- Spokane Police and the Sheriff's Office revamped the community crime map about a year ago.
The map lets you track crime in your neighborhood almost in real time. It is updated every hour but it does not show a complete picture of all crime across Spokane.
On the map, a dot represents a different type of crime. A red fist represents an aggravated assault, the car is a stolen vehicle and the blue house is residential burglary. You can even search by address and specific dates.
There are also boxes to check to see homicide, attempted homicide, death investigation and sexual assault. When you uncheck every other box but those four, suddenly the map is empty.
While looking at the map, the date range is January 1, 2017 to January 1, 2018. If you only looked at the map, it would seem there had no murders or sexual assaults for an entire year and obviously that is not the case.
So why do they not show up on the crime map? If you click on the Metadata tab, it explains why. The Spokane Police Department and the Spokane County Sheriff's Office do not submit data for homicides, attempted homicides or sexual offenses to the crime map. This means violent offenses will never show up here.
KREM 2 asked both departments why the map does this and they said it is to protect the integrity of ongoing investigations and for victim safety. Putting a dot on the map at the address where a sexual assault occurred could potentially identify the victim. KREM 2 also asked why not go back and add homicides to the map once the investigation is finished and they said they do not have enough staff to do that.