Impressive concept!

One thought on the generation of the real-time maps:

As others have remarked, it takes some time for the crime map to show up. On my system (FireFox) I had to click past a couple of "Script appears to be busy ..." dialogs before the chosen map eventually appeared.

Hopefully you aren't generating this map on the fly for each hit, because I don't think that's necessary. The maps are always the same, until a new report comes in. You could basically regenerate static pages (e.g. with a background server process) each time a report is received. In fact, you'd only have to regenerate the ones that have changed, not all of them will change for a given new crime report.

If your current engine *is* generating maps on the fly, that is of course perfect to support ad-hoc queries, so definitely don't delete that function < g >

UPDATE: clicking on the "Simple Assaults" link (64 reports) basically crashed FireFox - 3 "busy scripts" messages, then CPU pinned indefinitely at 100%.

A couple of appearance quibbles:
- you might want to clean up the artwork (e.g. dept. seal), it should be optimized for on-screen web page resolution, and in some places it's oval instead of round
- I'd consider a sans-serif font instead Times (New) Roman. You might want to rationalize any style sheet(s) you may be using