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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Block Watch, squared


The co-founders of Postacrime.com are David Stone, Ben Sharpe, Greg Isom and Adam Phillabaum. Seattle Times
 (ERIKA SCHULTZ  Seattle Times / The Spokesman-Review)
Tom Sowa I The Spokesman-Review

A Seattle startup wants to offer homeowners and businesses a Web site to post pictures. But these wouldn’t be vacation photos. Postacrime.com, which launched in June, wants its users to post photos and video of people suspected of committing crimes. Half search site and half online police blotter, postacrime wants to become an early warning system for people worried about crime in their neighborhoods.

Postacrime’s main page opens with a map of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia and a cluster of balloon markers around Portland and Seattle. On the right is a panel of small images showing suspects photographed before or during a recent crime.

Most users of postacrime will punch in their address and look to see if there are any crime reports near their neighborhood, and if so, they will show up as colored balloons. One feature allows members to create regular e-mail updates, telling them if any new crimes are reported in their neighborhood.

Users can also search by specific city, ZIP code and by type of crime. The site’s data is updated daily.

Another unusual feature is the option of offering rewards. A recent crime report, from a resident in Issaquah, included the offer of $100 for apprehending the person who broke into a house and took some items on Oct. 12.

The company’s four founders all work in regular day jobs but launched the site as a venture in Web crime-stopping.

Two of the four founders hail from Spokane. Chief technology director Adam Phillabaum attended Gonzaga Prep and then the University of Idaho before moving to Seattle. Ben Sharpe, who is in charge of company public relations and marketing, attended Mount Spokane High School before taking a job with a tech company in Seattle.

Sharpe said the long-term goal is to develop a site that connects and informs people concerned about stopping crime in their hometowns.

The recent case of Interpol finding a suspected child molester by unscrambling images of his face convinced Sharpe the Web continues evolving in its roles of spreading information and finding solutions.

“That’s the power of the Internet we’re hoping to harness with postacrime.com,” he said.

But what it is now is anything but well-developed. Sharpe said there are about 25,000 postings, and not all of them are current.

For Spokane and North Idaho, postacrime has just one crime listing. That’s a bank robbery, complete with a photo of the female suspect, taken in March 2006. The listing is from an unsolved Coeur d’Alene Bank of America robbery.

Phillabaum said the site’s database will grow over time. “The more information we get, the merrier,” said Phillabaum.

The founders want business owners with video cameras or digital cameras to upload images of suspects in unsolved crimes. As YouTube has demonstrated, Web sites posting those images can reach out to users who eventually identify those suspects.

Another source of data for postacrime is Web sites developed by police agencies that do a solid job of providing updated crime reports in their communities. The city of Bellevue’s police department Web site, for one, is a regular source of data that gets imported by postacrime, said Sharpe.

Nothing like that is available in Spokane yet. Spokane County doesn’t have the resources to provide Web crime data, said sheriff’s department spokesman Dave Reagan.

Spokane’s city police department does produce a limited online map of crime-dispatch reports at www.spokanegis.org/crimemap. But it is refreshed only once per month. And, said Spokane police senior planner Dave Lund, the map tracks crime calls only. “It doesn’t mean every call is a crime. A lot of people call with a robbery, when they’re really reporting a theft,” he said.

Since just a small fraction of the site’s reports come directly from victims, postacrime also grabs pictures and reports from among hundreds of publicly available Web sites that track and publish crime data. Many of those are grass-roots sites or blogs managed by neighborhood residents doing the leg work to gather and publish reports in their towns.

Eventually, the site needs a large number of members to take the added step of posting information directly to postacrime, said Sharpe. Those posts wouldn’t need to include pictures or videos, although that would be helpful, said Sharpe.

“We also want to add discussion forums and comment areas,” he said, “so that it’s also something of an Internet neighborhood crime watch.”