For those wondering which crime hot spots are closest to their homes, the Champaign Police Department has announced the completion of an upgrade to an interactive crime-mapping website.

The website reports all crimes committed in the city of Champaign by location, according to a press release from the department.

Public crime reports generally require a trip to the local police station, especially when the data is sorted by a specific area or time frame.

Instead of having to ask police explicit queries, any Internet user can now access these media reports from the comfort of his or her home computer at the website www.CrimeReports.com.

Champaign Police Chief R.T. Finney said he hopes that providing the Champaign community with access to this information “will help them prevent and solve crime in their neighborhoods.”

“Information is power,” Finney said in the release.

Scott Kinzie, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for CrimeReports, said sharing valuable crime information with citizens allows them to make “better informed decisions about their personal safety.”

“We believe that informed citizens foster safer communities,” Kinzie said. “We anticipate the increased crime transparency facilitated by this tool will result in an appreciable positive impact on community safety.”

CrimeReports is partnered with over 1,600 police agencies across the nation that release their media reports to the mapping website, including metropolitan areas such as Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles County.

Gary Spear, crime analyst for the Champaign Police Department, said the mapping client may be linked to Champaign’s website as soon as next week, although the most recent crimes have already been uploaded.

Spear added that users can receive e-mail notifications of crimes that happen within a certain radius of a chosen location or if a registered sex offender moves within that specified radius.

“You can be on a vacation in Hawaii and still check up on local neighborhood crime,” Spear said.

CrimeReports allows a user to filter incidents by the specific type of crime and the time frame of the crime history being viewed. It also displays an automatically calculated graph of local crime trends. Single crimes are represented as crime-specific icons, which display the time, report identifier, the given description of the specific incident and the reporting agency.

The website also displays visual profiles of local registered sex offenders, provided by the Illinois State Sex Offender Registry.

The CrimeReports service will only charge $199 a month for cities with a population of over 50,000 residents, according to the release.

The software is also compatible with the Apple iPhone, as a CrimeReports application is available for download on the Apple iTunes store.