About UMICH DPS Project

The Clery Act dictates that all federally funded universities share information about crimes that occur on campus. The crime log for the University of Michigan leaves some wanting, so this website is an alternative take on the data. Some of the niceties you’ll find here:

• Quick and responsive (data loads faster)
• Maps to pinpoint incidents
• Statistics to draw fun interpretations from

Perhaps most importantly, this is/was a side project to try my hand at modern web development. I welcome everyone to examine (contribute!?) to the code over on Github.

The data is generated by downloading the previous day’s incidents and appending it to a running list of incidents, and by offloading the data, the backend server for the DPS’s won’t be stressed every serving additional requests.

I previously created another site with a similar purpose only it was architected slightly different (focused mainly server-side). The old site also gathered data by manually scraping the police department’s site because their JSON API had not been constructed. Rethinking the site, I decided to focus more on offline capabilities and user experience. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded.

Why is this site focused on the University of Michigan? Well, it’s my alma mater!