Online crime reports will be filtered by sheriff’s office
SNOHOMISH - Since the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office took over police services for the city, there has been no Snohomish police blotter in the Tribune.
The contracted police department won’t be providing media incident reports to the Tribune, but it will provide a self-generated police blotter online in the form of a crime map that will be available to the public in a couple of months. The information available online will be filtered by the sheriff’s office, Police Chief John Flood said.
When the crime map is up and running, the Tribune hopes to bring back the Snohomish blotter.
“We like to have the blotter, so we can keep an eye on where the burglaries are,” a block watch captain said in a voicemail to the Tribune.
The now-disbanded Snohomish Police Department had a city employee who produced and sent all incident reports to the Tribune. The Tribune would then pick which reports to publish each week in the police blotter. That employee lost her job when the city signed the five-year contract with the sheriff’s office for police services.
The online crime map will contain crimes the sheriff’s office chooses to release to the public.
The crime reports likely will include burglaries, vehicle prowls, theft — “things that are kind of quality of life issues to the community,” Flood said.
The department is open to suggestions from the community on what crimes to publish, but that doesn’t mean all suggestions will be published, he said.
The department-filtered blotter will be available through www.crimemapping.com. A sample map of the city of Normandy Park is available now as an example, Flood said.
A benefit of the online map will be that the department could potentially have crime information published within a couple of hours, Flood said. (The traditional blotter was about two weeks behind.)
Users will be able to customize the data.
“You’ll be able to go online and look at crimes and what time frames you want to see. A day’s worth or a couple months’ worth of activity, you can define that yourself, that’s completely dependent on the user,” Flood said. “We’ll be putting information into that system. We just need to decide what types of crimes that we want to put on the map.”
It is unknown at this time if the Tribune will get access to a traditional blotter under the sheriff’s contract.

By STEPHANIE KOSONEN
Published May 2, 2012