ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s hard to have eyes everywhere these days and your cameras and motion sensors only go so far, so how do you keep track of what’s going on?

Crime mapping is a tool that tracks dispatched police calls, basically in real-time, and pins the incidents down to a single address.

That was an option in Albuquerque. However, some people are saying that is no longer available – and they sorely miss it. They’re even taking their concerns to police for answers about when this map may come back.

Nancy Henry is one of those people. She is a firm believer that knowledge is power. And she gained a lot of knowledge about crime in her northeast Albuquerque neighborhood, thanks to the crime mapping website.

“I was quite shocked at what I was finding and the more I kept using the tool the more I found,” Henry said.

Auto theft, narcotics use, assault, burglary, it was all happening within blocks of her age 55+ community.

“Very useful, and I would then report to the neighbors you know what was going on,” Henry said.

As an advocate for open government, she was submitting public records requests for reports and police body camera footage from those calls.

Then, about 10 days ago, she opened the tool and found a blank map.

“I thought, ‘Well, how could it be that there’s no crime in my neighborhood or anywhere in Albuquerque?'” Henry said.

Usually, the map has icons that represent certain crimes. You click on them to find the location, time, date and report number.

Now, though?

“I have no idea anymore what’s going on in our community,” Henry said.

An APD representative told her last week the city is working on its own public-facing portal for crime stats and mapping. They no longer use crime mapping.

“Normally, you don’t take one tool down until another is tested and implemented. So now we have nothing,” Henry said.

A different APD representative told KOB 4 that the city is no longer exploring the option of having its own portal. The main focus is to integrate its new Computer-Aided Dispatch – CAD – system with all other operations. They said it wasn’t syncing with the crime mapping website, so that’s why it’s temporarily unavailable.

APD still posts monthly crime states and weekly homicide updates. However, Henry says that’s not enough for her.

“I’m not interested in statistics. I want to know the hard facts about what’s going on across the street, down the street, behind me and so on,” she said.

Henry hopes she can check those facts again soon.