My “cool-find” for the day has to do with Crime. For those of us who have traveled to various cities for the first time, in the back of ones mind is always the concern of taking the wrong turn and ending up in a part of town that you never intended to be in.

Disclaimer: This does not apply to those times when you are taken somewhere in a foreign country by “friends” to have a fun night out, only to find that they have left you as a joke. (never mind, long story that I am still a bit bitter about)

Anyhow, my find is another Google Maps “Mash-up” that combines interesting or valuable data over the powerful Google Maps platform. This one is SpotCrime. The object is to take public data on crimes that occurs and map them to Google Maps.

What results is a potentially valuable tool for people traveling or re-locating to a new city. Here you can visually see areas within a city that are clusters of criminal activity. Sure every city large and small has its crime, but for those right-brained people out there like myself, seeing this information visually allows you to quickly divert your route or select a new neighborhood to either travel through or, if buying/renting, avoid.

Besides, the filters that can be applied are pretty cool with their little Google Map friendly icons:

In conducting a quick trial, I first searched around Newark, NJ, the closest major city to my home. Wow. More shootings than robberies or theft. That was a bit of a surprise. But then I need look no further than Miami, FL to get my fill of theft occurrences.

You have to ask yourself where this information is being pulled from. According to Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch, the information is direct from either the local Law Enforcement agencies or through news reports where Police Blotters are not necessarily availabe. Worst case is that some of the information is manually submitted. Scalable? I think not.

I can see the potential in this tool for many reasons. Combined with the Mash-up that allows you to locate local registered child/sex offenders I would find these tools extremely valuable to parents, couples and businesses like Real Estate. Hmmm, I know, combine this information with a service like Zillow.com and you have a pretty good tool to analyze everything about your neighborhood. Uh oh…. 76 Realty apparently already does this.

For more interesting Google Maps “Mash-ups” Mashable.com has a really good listing of some of thier favorites, as does GoogleMapsMania