Good news for crime reporters with large workloads and not a lot of time to keep up with an entire city.

A new Web site called SpotCrime.com combines the attention demanding police scanner with Google’s Maplets technology to form the ultimate tool for anyone who has ever been tasked with working the crime/safety beat shift.

Information, gathered from police department crime logs and local news organizations, is divided into various incident categories and represented with a different icon on the Maplet.

Users can search any combination of incidents with relatively zero effort. You can even review entire months of reported data at the same time and then narrow the search results by time of day. While there is a disclaimer on the incident data—similar to Google’s statement about driving directions— all information reported contains a link to the source.

“Our data collection methodologies are relatively new, however, we are estimating accuracy above 95 percent,” said Head of Research Greg Kastner in an e-mail. “Journalists could use our site to focus attention on areas of high crime that seem to be neglected.”

While the new web site offers a clean interface and easy access to large amounts of information, it doesn’t replace the police scanner just yet since its still the fastest way to find out about incidents. The rate at which SpotCrime can add new incidents depends on how quickly police departments update their logs, which can be anywhere from 2 hours to 3 days after occurring, according to Kastner.

Right now, the 125 most populated cities in the country are represented on SpotCrime and over a million incident reports have been logged since going live January 2008, according to site President Colin Drane. Eventually, he said, more cities will get added.

SpotCrime also offers their aggregated crime report information via e-mail, text messaging, applications for the iPhone and Facebook and a Google Earth data link. Support for both Twitter and RSS are still in the testing stage.