Map of New York City Police Stops - NYTimes.com

Stop, Question and Frisk in New York Neighborhoods

New York City’s police force, in its fight against crime, has increasingly used a strategy known as “stop, question and frisk,” which allows officers to stop someone based on a reasonable suspicion of crime. One expert has estimated New Yorkers are stopped at twice the national rate. The impact on crime is much debated, and critics contend disproportionate stopping of minorities is a result of racial profiling, which police officials dispute. Related Article »
via nytimes.com

Map of New York City Police Stops

By the Numbers
The number of stops has increased to nearly 600,000 in a year.
Intense Policing
Residents of some parts of the city feel the police presence much more acutely than others. Although frequency of stops is roughly commensurate with the crime rate over broad areas, the police presence in some places is disproportionate.
Who Gets Stopped
Mostly young, mostly minorities. More than 90 percent are male.
via nytimes.com

UMapper

I suppose I have always been a bit of a cartography geek, quick and ready to name some obscure capital at parties...  And I have happily traversed the far reaches of internet mapping, behind my desk, fascinated by the sublime visual perspective and the sheer interactive functionality of Google Earth, Bing Maps 3D, and the myriad of applications within each.

So, I was very excited last week when I found UMapper, a brand new, open-source map generation platform, which allows you to create fully customized, user-generated overlays out of all of the major web mapping platforms (Bing Maps, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Yahoo.), and export your very own embeddable KML files to use in your blogs, websites, etc.

UMapper also has a really fun “geogame” creator called GeoDart, where you input geographical areas and questions and they will generate a location-based trivia game.  See below for an NYC landmark trivia game:


Pretty cool!

Here is a GeoDart game of Countries and Capitals: