We’ll soon find out whether the neighbourhoods with a bad reputation for crime really have that much crime.

Halifax Regional Police will be putting crime data on a map for everyone to see.

Deputy Police Chief Bill Moore says Naples, Florida uses the same internal software as the force here, so porting the tools over was not that hard.

“They’re using the same basic software as the municipality uses, and they’ve built a few little add-on widgets that they provided to us for free,” said Moore.

The online map will show actual crime locations, rounded off to protect privacy, not merely calls for service.

The deputy chief is not concerned about neighbourhoods being stigmatized, because data is just data.

“I also wear the hat of the Freedom of Information Officer,” he said. “If someone came in and asked me for that under a Freedom of Information Request, we would give it to them. So, the idea of open data is to be able to provide data in an open, sharing environment and let people look and see what it is. Are there going to be pockets of the city that may have higher incidents of crime? Yes. But we know that today.”

The maps should be available early in the new year.