First came the online availability of police reports in certain categories of incident (start here) – now, Seattle Police have added incident types to the city’s My Neighborhood map, which has been available a while with multiple layers of other types of information. We’re still wandering around it ourselves but wanted to share the link in case you hadn’t already heard. As explained here, the icons – showing what type of report was taken – will start showing up as soon as six hours later. The announcement on SPD Blotter summarizes:

The crime reporting map is a short-term view of crime: it provides a good sense of what is reported to be going on in a certain neighborhood or the city at large at any time. It is also good for seeing patterns of types of crimes happening (such as an unusual amount of reported bike thefts in your area).

If you choose to use the “neighborhood” view instead of the specific-address view, note that Southwest is basically “western West Seattle,” while Delridge is the label for most of the eastern half of the peninsula. 8:25 PM: After spending some time clicking around, one observation: While more categories of crime are reported on the map, the reports to which you can link don’t offer any additional detail – so far we’ve clicked on the report links for crimes such as auto theft and animal bites, and the only detail on the “report” is what block and what day/time.