Wildblotter keeps you informed about crime in your neighborhood

Last year, Jack Robert was sitting in the kitchen of his new home in Eastern Washington. Being a father of 2 young boys combined with transplanting from Seattle, Jack wanted a quick pulse on crime in the little town of Chelan, Washington. Surely it would be something much less than Western Washington, but how could he really know?

Thus began a quest to figure out how Chelan fared from a crime perspective. He scoured the local paper, the web, as well as the local courthouse and police station websites for articles and police blotter information. He then took one more obvious step and did a Google mapping of registered sex offenders in the area on Family Watchdog.

"After nearly 4 hours, I had a fairly clear idea of crime in the area," Jack recalls, "But I should not have had to search so many places for this information - it should not have taken so long."

A former product manager and market analyst from Seattle, Jack set out to see if there was a way to bring all of this information to a single sight for people. Wildblotter was born.

Wildblotter indexes and aggregates data on crime from over 20,000 cities nationwide, and integrates sex offender mapping into a single website. People can also set up alerts for keywords and types of crime that they want to be contacted about. Robert says that the site has become popular for people that want to keep abreast of crime activity in their neighborhood. The free service is ad supported and serves over 177,000 users nationwide, but growth is skyrocketing as parents and neighbors spread the word.

Wildblotter's team of 3 is now working on some tools that users have requested; online tools to help organize and run neighborhood watches, and some tools to help users compare crime relative to other neighborhoods.

"Our data sources are neither perfect nor complete, so it can be challenging to help people compare crime with other locations," says Robert of their site. Missing persons and Amber Alert data feeds are currently in the works.

While basic ads keep the lights on, Wildblotter is in discussion with companies like ADT, Americas Most Wanted's Safety Center, and Dateline NBC. Partnerships like these will further strengthen Wildblotter's value proposition. Other discussions are ongoing which would make Wildblotter a web service for other site, a much more distributed model.