The company I work at, CQ Press which is a division of Sage Publications, recently released the annual crime report publication. How does your city rank? Check out the rankings at
City Crime Rankings 2008.
After looking at the rankings, I started wondering if social media could be used to report crimes. In my opinion, the social media tools that would be most effective would be blogs, rss feeds, maps, and Twitter.
Here are some examples and articles about the use of maps and Twitter to report crime:
Oakland Crimespotting
Los Angeles Police Department Crime Maps
Police a-Twitter over news alerts
Mountain View Police Join Twitter