Open Data site a useful tool on City of Prince George website

Ever wonder about the crime happening in your neighbourhood?

Right down to what kind of crime happened on what street on what day as far back as 2021, for curiosity's sake?

“We have dashboard info graphics available for the public to view, making it a lot easier for them to interpret,” said Laura McKersie, geographic information systems (GIS) analyst for the city.

On the City of Prince George website, under City Hall in the top right, click Maps & Access to Information, scroll down the info bar on the left, click on Open Data, then scroll down the Open Data home page to get to the dashboard infographics. There, second from the left, is the Property Crime in Prince George dashboard.

“We work with the RCMP to be able to illustrate property crime within the city and it is updated on a biweekly basis,” McKersie said. “We process the data and we ensure anonymity so they are not at exact locations. We have it so that you are able to see the property crime based on a certain month.”

There is a legend of symbols indicating what type of crime took place at what location.

The site comes with this statement and disclaimer: "This data is designed to provide individuals with a general overview of incidents, aid in coordinating crime prevention initiatives, and improving community awareness. All the property crime incident locations have been generalized and a dispersal pattern applied and should be considered approximate."

On the website there is a dropdown that allows the user to go back as far as 2021 and there is a custom date range to see what crime took place on what day, week or month.

“So what prompted this application to be made available to the public was Community Policing approached the city as they had an elderly gentleman who would put a pin in a wall map and they were looking to digitize it to allow more people to see it,” McKersie said.

The Property Crime in Prince George dashboard is ideal for people might want to know what they’re getting into before they make a move.

“You have people who are moving to the city who may want a little extra information about the area they are moving to so now we have it available,” she said.

The service requests dashboard is another very popular tool.

Clicking through and bumping up the map, as an example for comparison sake, to the area around the Lower Patricia Boulevard encampment sees the top four requests include biohazards, litter, needles, and squatters.

While moving over to College Heights on Westmount Drive, the top four requests are utilities locate, garbage collection, water on/off and water maintenance.

The City of Prince George Open Data website provides that and so much more.

“Open Data is pretty much a digital repository of information,” McKersie said.

For convenience sake there is a link from the PGMap service to the Open Data site.

A popular option is the orthophotos, which are actual aerial pictures of a property, for example, that also includes a slider to take the viewer as far back as 1993.

When accessing the ortho everything can be downloaded.

“It comes as a zip file and you can open that image,’ McKersie said. “Ortho is a really big thing to offer to people as downloadable so they don’t have to come into the city offices with a hard drive. We wanted to make it more accessible to the public so we were able to develop this downloading mapping application.

“We have all kinds of data layers to look up and download. We also have our gallery of maps and apps that we created for the City of Prince George. We have  an evacuation management mapping application, and we have a downtown heritage walking tour that is a story map that people can walk through and bring up images. So we have some different things for people to be able to utilize in the Open Data site.”