The Harford County Sheriff’s Office has become the latest jurisdiction in the Baltimore region to post incidents on crimereports.com, hoping residents and business owners will use it to keep track of crime in their area.

“The best part is the transparency of the crime numbers it provides to the public,” said Capt. Dale Stonesifer, of the sheriff’s planning and research office.

“If, in a neighborhood, they notice an increase in vehicle thefts, they can practice better crime prevention like not leaving valuables in an unlocked car.”

Using a grant from the Governor’s Office of Crime Patrol and Prevention, the Sheriff’s Office transfers information each night to the Salt Lake City-based Public Systems Inc., which uses an adaptation of Google Maps to display where those crimes occurred. The county began sending information in late June.

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The system only shows block numbers — not the exact address of the incident — as well as the date, charges and a tracking number, said Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Monica Worrell.

The site allows users to sort the types of crime and measure the distance from the address they enter.

“It helps the citizens to be our eyes and ears,” Stonesifer said.

The Sheriff’s Office also is using a version of ComStat, the program developed by New York City to track crime data in detail, to analyze crime trends and find hot spots.

The detail in the so-called CountyStat is far greater than the information available on crimereports.com, because it is used internally by police, Worrell said.

“If that material were college-level, [crimereports.com] would be elementary school,” she said.

But the information online is still enough to assist in community policing, she said, and interested parties could take the tracking number to the records office, submit a public information request and receive more information about incidents near their houses or businesses.

So far, Harford and Maryland State Police are the only agencies in the Baltimore region to use crimereports.com — leaving gaps where nonparticipating local police departments, like Bel Air, Aberdeen and Havre de Grace, have jurisdiction.

Worrell said she was uncertain of which other jurisdictions were in talks to join the site.

Anne Arundel is in talks to work with crimereports.com on a trial basis, and a county Web site allows users to plug in an address and see general crime statistics for the surrounding area, spokesman Sgt. John Gilmer said.

The Howard police Web site has a mapping program that posts the number of crimes in each patrol district every month from the crime analysis division, but does not provide locations or details, said Officer Bryce Buell, a police spokesman.

Baltimore City spokesman Sterling Clifford said city police also update their own crime maps weekly by putting symbols for each crime on the block where it occurred.

That system may be updated in the near future as part of the Web site overhaul begun in January, Clifford said, but the city is not expected to join crimereports.com because it is funding its own program.

The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office would need to update its computer system if it wanted to map crimes, but once it does, officials would prefer to display their own data online, Maj. Phil Kasten said.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com