This page displays Wilmington, DE crime data overlayed on Google maps in an attempt to show a safer route when walking or driving in Wilmington. The sizes of the circles around the crimes show how recent they are, the orange shapes show crime hot spots. The page will try to go around the crimes for you, click Auto-route to stop it or turn it off and click Go again to adjust it yourself.

Enter an origin in the Start textbox or press Locate Me to select your current position if available.

Enter a destination into the End textbox or "long click" on the map.

Crimes that happened close to the entered Time of day will be displayed. If am/pm is not specified, military time is used. If no time is entered, the current system time is entered automatically.

You can pick either Walking or Driving directions, or disable Auto-route. Press Go to display a route.

The route can be modified just like in regular Google maps. Once you are satisfied with your route, you can press Gmaps to open a Google maps direction page or the Maps app on your phone.

The icons shown after clicking Go show all crimes in the past 2 years that happened near the hour in the Time field. For example, if 11:15am was entered, crimes that happened between 10am and 1pm are shown. A legend of the icons is displayed near the top left.

Hover over an icon to see a quick summary of the incident. Click an icon to see additional information and a link to a report on the incident. The size of the circle gives a quick view of how recently the crime took place. Bigger circles represent more recent crimes.

The Orange overlay represents crime hot spots with the premise being, if an area has more than a certain amount of crime at ANY time of the day it should always be avoided. The "heat threshold" (how close and frequent crimes are to an area before they show up in orange) can be modified below. Default is for a given area to display as a hot spot if it was less than 100 meters from 4 crimes that happened any time in the last 2 years.

The crime data shown was extracted from here, was updated March 30, 2016, and goes back to 2011. The orange heatmap shows areas that have at least a certain amount of crime, but does not tell you if certain areas within a given orange section have even more crime than the threshold. The goal of the auto-rerouting is to cover the smallest distance in the orange area, but this potentially will take you through a more dangerous part of a orange section. Your best bet is to avoid the orange areas altogether.

Let's go ahead and call the rerouting "beta". It will fail miserably at times. The difficulty of best route logic is my excuse.

Heatmap Crime Settings

# of:      Meters from:      Years since: