A Baltimore businessman is clashing with CrimeReports.com over access to police records, saying the Salt Lake City-based company and its clients are restricting his access to public information.

Colin Drane, founder of SpotCrime.com, said he was presented with a cease-and-desist order from CrimeReports.com parent Public Engines Inc. in June after his company allegedly skimmed data from CrimeReports’ Web site.

“Under their terms of service, a commercial company can’t access and use their data. ... Only certain people can access it in certain ways,” Drane said. The terms of service, according to the order, limit access to “personal, non-commercial use only.”

He said the order raised the question of whether public information such as crime reports can be “commodified,” becoming the exclusive property of one company.

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Both SpotCrime and CrimeReports cull data from police to create interactive maps online showing where crimes occur. While CrimeReports is paid to pull information directly from police computer systems, SpotCrime uses multiple sources including news agencies, public information requests and, until June, CrimeReports.com.

David Politis, a spokesman for CrimeReports, said Public Engines Inc. charges police $99 to $199 a month to map their crime data. SpotCrime does not charge for posting the information, but makes some money from advertising, Drane said.

Greg Whisenant, Public Engines’ president and chief executive officer, said the desist order to SpotCrime was intended to ensure only accurate and up-to-date information was provided to the public. A third party unbound by contracts with the police could wrongly portray an area’s crime and risk harming people or businesses with old or inaccurate data, he added.

But Drane said any restrictions may create precedents for limiting access to the original information.

“Our fear is that an agency will contract with another company and then respond to requests for information by saying, ‘We already put this information out there through this company; we don’t have to respond to your request,’” Drane said.

He cited a letter received Thursday in response to requests for data from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office in California, which said the police did not have to respond to SpotCrime because the data was already available to the public through CrimeReports.

The Harford County Sheriff’s Office was the latest agency to join CrimeReports.com, using grant funding provided by the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, spokeswoman Monica Worrell said. Joining CrimeReports does not prevent her office from responding to requests for information, she said.

“A [Public Information Act] request is just that — a request for public information,” she said. “Either they meet the requirements for the release of the information or they don’t.”

Whisenant said he did not know whether CrimeReports’ contracts prevented police from sharing their information with other companies, but said it was logical if they did.

“It’s not economically feasible for agencies to create multiple streams of data and then ensure that information is up to date,” he said.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com