“Yelm citizens now have a new source to check local criminal activity.

Residents can log on to the Web site, CrimeReports.com

The Yelm Police Department is one of four Thurston County agencies participating in the program.

‘We looked at the benefits of what it can provide to our citizens,’ said Yelm Police Chief Todd Stancil.

‘Rather than have the info stored on a server somewhere, its out there for the public to use,’ Stancil said.

Citizens can log on to the Yelm page and review all criminal cases in Yelm over the previous 30 days.

A map shows where the crime is located and a sidebar lists the time, date, location and type of crime.

Cases can be sorted by crime, date or location and broken down into statistics.

A statistics page also provides information in graphs and pie charts.

Citizens can also sign up to receive automatic e-mail alerts when a crime happens near their home.

Incident data is updated every weekday night.

Anyone can access the information for any city involved with the program,” quoting the NVN.