After the success of the Oracle Project, I'm getting more involved in research for a few of you.

I'm doing a research project for several RLSH needing help with gang tag identification.

As I have categorized tags from the Kansas City Meetup in 2009, I'm thinking of uploading the pictures into a folder online.

Then, each of us can take pictures of the gang tags in our neighborhoods that we patrol and upload them.

By tagging them by location, we can start identifying the size and scope of different turfs and help each other identify emerging threats.

Anyone up to the challenge?

Awesome idea. I'll contribute what I can.

There's a guy HERE doing something similar, I'll ask him if he'd be interested in collaborating with us.

I must contribute. I think you've seen the archive of gang tags on my facebook.

If they were all in one central location, say a Flickr album, and we could tag it by city, county and state, we could really keep track of this stuff. The fact that this doesn't already exist for law enforcement is...terrifying. I would love to be wrong.

the city works depatment where I get my removal supplies has a pretty good database of tags. I might be able to get some of that information. of course, that would only be relevant to chula vista...

If you guys get an address or GPS reading to accompany the tag, I'd love an excuse to play around with arc gis mapping some more and learn how to graph gang territories.

Most of my graffiti pics are geo tagged.

That'd be awesome. I've really wanted to work more with geotagging but haven't had a good excuse. As an aside, just uploaded a lot of gang info sites to TOP.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I used to have a lot of resources on gangs, gang tags, cults, and stuff that I collected up when I worked for the Dept. of Corrections. Most of it got lost in the many moves and such...some got burned up in a fire...some got stolen by a "friend"...most of it is long gone, but I'm gonna have to try and track all that down again and share it.

I'll be back in Chattanooga soon helping my dad move and I'll try to see if I can get pictures of some of the tagging that's there. No promises though.

UA, got a link on that tag database?

I do believe their information is in house, and not available online. I'll call and ask later.

I'll go through some of my photos from San Antonio and see if there's any tags that happened to get in. I never went through and specifically took pictures of tags, but they were everywhere so maybe I'll find some. If not I'll take pictures when/if I get back down there.

I seem to remember "PHC" or something like that tagged a lot of different places. The teens I worked with would always just wear their colors (mostly red, some blues) and baseball caps in that color. There were a lot that wore red baseball caps for the Bloods, but from a "C" team (Cinncinatti, etc) as a sign of disrespect to the Crips. There were a lot of red caps with a "W" though, which I never could figure out.

~Rogue

Is everyone ok with Flickr or maybe Picasa? Not really good with the photo sharing if anyone wants to one up me on tech.

Heard back from the guy at NWgangs. He's tentatively agreed to collaborate with us.

Whatever we do, if it can pump out an excel sheet with gps data and a gang name, it'll be easier for me to upload it into a map that shows regions instead of just points on a map.

Can you take the GPS coordinates from photo metadata? Check out a program called Photo ME.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

you can indeed sir. some versions of windows (don't know about mac) let you see the coordinates on the properties of the picture. right click, properties.

The program I referenced, Photo ME, lets you extract date and coordinates from a digital picture.

yeah, looking into that. I remember being more tech savvy...