With almost 1000 violent crimes per 100,000 people, Memphis Tennessee reluctantly takes the title of 2nd most dangerous city in the US (following Detroit, MI, with 1200 crimes per 100,000).
The City of Memphis and Police Department have taken award winning steps to help make the city safer. The Real Time Crime Center is credited for bringing crime down 10% from the previous year, and has recently won a national award celebrating technological innovation.
The center features a system of cameras, a staff monitoring the cameras and analyzing data. This website allows the citizen interaction, particularly by giving citizens the ability to add their own cameras to the system, increasing the system coverage, and by providing real time crime information. New York created a Real Time Crime Center about 4 years ago, and many cities allow users to review and map crimes local to a named point, but data available to the citizens for most, if not all, of these other systems are delayed by days if not weeks.
The value of alerting citizens in (near) real time of crimes that have just occurred is immense. Citizens in the neighborhood of the crime can be on the lookout for their own safety, and also for suspicious people or occurrences that may end up being useful in crime solving.
The site also contains a centralized list of neighborhood watch groups.