EXCLUSIVE: The City of Victoria’s and the Township of Esquimalt’s latest neighbourhood crime statistics will remain inaccessible to the public for an undetermined period, according to the Victoria Police Department (VicPD).

 

Offline since early March, VicPD’s CrimeReports.com public crime map suffered a data upload problem that crippled the feed, says police spokesman Const. Matt Rutherford.

 

“There is a problem with the feed to CrimeReports. [The VicPD IT department] has since moved to a new server and thought that would correct the problem, but unfortunately it didn’t,” Rutherford said in an April 14 statement to Citified Media.

 

However, this isn’t the first time public access to VicPD’s crime stats was interrupted.

 

In March of last year an interactive CrimeReports map was removed from the force’s website and replaced with a message asking the public to identify what crime statistics were desirable and what they would be used for.

 

In that instance it was soon discovered that although the data feed may have been removed from VicPD’s website, it remained accessible to the public through a workaround made possible by logging on to CrimeReports.com and conducting a manual search focused on VicPD’s jurisdiction. As of March of this year that workaround is no longer an option.

 

For the time being access to crime goings-on throughout Victoria and Esquimalt remain limited to VicPD’s public announcements and media reports, which, Rutherford says, will remain the status quo until staff develop a solution.

 

“[IT staff] continue to work on [the issue]. As soon as [the server] is able to upload, [the feed] will start,” Rutherford confirmed.

 

On the Saanich Peninsula the Central Saanich Police Department also appears to be facing its own CrimeReports data upload quagmire.

 

Offline since early March, the latest public crime data for the community remains unavailable. The force has not responded to Citified Media’s request for confirmation of a reinstatement date or the reasons behind the blackout. C