Damn it. Someone beat us to the punch on a new and very cool Google Maps hack.

These days, pretty much everything is plugged into Google Maps. We even developed our own nifty little Google Map with the Metro system overlayed on it (which WMATA promptly ripped off, or so we’d like to think).

Late last year, we figured it’d be cool to find a way to plug in the District’s list of criminal incidents into a Google Map, allowing users to search neighborhoods and see what types of crimes occureed when and where. Someone was apparently way ahead of us, because not only did they come up with such a hack for the District, but also for 80 other localities ranging from Mobile, Alabama to Seattle, Washington.

With the site — incidentlog.com — you can search through any number of crimes, accidents, and incidents. Assaults, robberies, murders, fires, domestic disturbances — you choose it, specify a location and date if you so desire, and watch as the chosen incidents are mapped out for you. You can then click on an incident, get the details, and even link to a long description of the event. The information feeding into the map doesn’t yet seem comprehensive, but this is no doubt an interesting start.

So, now that someone covered that, what can we hack into Google Maps?

Thanks to A Unique Alias from Direct Current for the tip.