Engineering seniors scrambling to finish senior design projects may want to take some cues from the pet project of an incoming professor: a Web site mapping crime hotspots around campus.
Phillycrime.org provides visitors with free access to a record of all criminal incidents reported in West Philadelphia, presented in an easy-to-read format.
Information can be sorted by date and type of crime, and the results are presented visually as dots on a map.
Site creator Joshua Plotkin -- a current Harvard junior fellow who will be starting work at Penn as a professor of Computer Science and Biology in two years -- initially developed PhillyCrime out of personal necessity.
"I was looking to buy a house in Philadelphia, and I wanted to know where and when crimes occur," he said.
Plotkin found that historical data about crimes in Philadelphia were difficult to access and felt that there was a way to make them more accessible.
"The site takes existing data and makes it easy to understand," Plotkin said.
Though PhillyCrime currently only incorporates information from the Penn Division of Public Safety and the Philadelphia Police Department's 18th District, Plotkin is looking into ways of expanding the site to encompass information from the entire city.
Despite the site's limited coverage area, its popularity has steadily increased since its launch on Oct. 5, and it now enjoys several hundred hits a day -- mostly from West Philadelphia residents.
However, Plotkin still feels that there is potential for the Penn community to better utilize PhillyCrime.
"It's most useful to students and faculty at Penn," he said. "That's where the data is centered."
Penn Sociology professor Elijah Anderson feels that the site is interesting from a criminology standpoint and hopes that it will help to improve understanding of the "crime phenomenon" in West Philadelphia.
However, he had reservations about the extent to which Penn students would alter their behavior based on information gathered from the site.
"In general, people will do what they have to do to get from point A to point B," he said. "There tends to be a feeling amongst pedestrians that crime happens to other people."
Some students agreed.
"I don't see much point in checking the site," Wharton sophomore Waseem Alim said. "If there's somewhere that I have to go, then I have to go."
However, Anderson said that it could be beneficial for students and faculty to incorporate information from PhillyCrime into their daily activities so that they could more easily avoid crime-prone areas.
He also stressed that it is important for pedestrians to always be street-wise, as crimes have the potential to occur in places where they haven't before.
