Plotting Crime, Street by Street

Krucoff said he thinks he has a good "first version" of the technology but is working on updating the program to include more information, such as arrests. The program took about four months to develop and was made by the city's technology department without specified grant or funding, Krucoff said.

Other cities that have crime mapping technology generally use colored dots to differentiate among crimes. Krucoff said his team decided to use the icons, which look like they are straight out of a 1980s video game, simply because they could.

"Maybe we're more creative than the other cities," he said. "We're a little prettier."

Police said they have not gotten any complaints yet about the symbols being too flippant for the serious subject matter.

The crime maps, which are not accessible using some browsers, are mostly tailored to home in on a neighborhood and will only show crimes in chunks of the city, rather than citywide. The largest area that can be queried online is a police district, and data can be searched as far back as two years.

And there are other limitations. The system will not map an area if a search draws more than 500 crimes, meaning that it is impossible to map a month of crime in the entire 3rd Police District, because there were 607 reported crimes there in the past 30 days. Instead, clicking on that district, which includes neighborhoods north of downtown such as Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle and the U Street corridor, will turn up a list of crimes broken down by offense.

Some police departments in the region want to add technology similar to that used in the District.

In Montgomery County, police spokeswoman Melanie Hadley said that the department is gearing up to provide crime data on online maps, but the system will not be available until the agency fully transitions to a new crime reporting system.

D.C. police said they have gotten positive feedback since the maps went online, and the suggestions they have gotten mostly have had the same theme.

"People want more data, presented in more sophisticated ways," Morison said.

Staff writers Ruben Castaneda, Tom Jackman, Ernesto Londoño and Theresa Vargas contributed to this report.