It’s an honor to receive a personal thank you post card from the Chief of Police. Click on the picture to view the entire content of the package I received this morning from Tomball, TX. Here’s the transcript of that letter.

Mikhail. Please accept this small token of thanks and gratitude for all you have done for the Tomball Police Department. Thanks for being such a great partner! [signed] RHauck

Thank you, Chief!

I’ve figured that bringing donuts to a police station wasn’t a good idea, so I brought my digital camera with me instead for my on-site visit with Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

No matter how hard we try, there are some things that just can not possibly be accomplished remotely from the office. In-person customer service is one of them. However, if client’s Internet connection is crawling slow or if there is some super protective firewall, we would not be able to connect into their system to do our jobs at all. Normally we do not go on-site because it defeats the purpose of employing a remote implementation team, but this was a very special case.

The time has come to tell you about my job.

I’m an Integration Engineer for a company named Public Engines. This company runs several websites; one of them is CrimeReports.com . It is a fairly young start-up, which specializes in providing services to citizens by gathering local criminal activity information from Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and making it public. In other words it’s a public-facing crime mapping service. If you live in the United States you can go to this website by clicking the link above. All you need to do is enter the address and it will show you the map of your city with any crime activity marked with colorful bubbles. Now that’s assuming that there’s a participating Police Department (PD) in your area that reports this kind of information.