Neighborhood Watch on the Internet

It started with four friends who wanted to help fight crime — but without the uniforms or late-night stakeouts.

When the Seattle-area men launched the Web site postacrime.com in late June, it was designed for small-business owners to post surveillance video and photos of thieves free of charge. The four creators saw the site as a YouTube for crime prevention.

The site's intention is to identify the suspects and help police.

But the site has been slow to catch on, with only a few business owners posting. Even though the site's creators are seeking people who want to post information, the site currently has items that are widely distributed on the Web — photos of bank robbers sought by the FBI, police mug shots from across the nation and daily crime reports released by the city of Bellevue.

Ben Sharpe, one of postacrime.com's creators, said they have revamped the initial plan for the site and are now hoping to include crime photos and video from block-watch groups and victims. Sharpe said he has met with Bellevue police and wants to meet with Seattle police and other local law enforcement to see if their investigators will contribute.

"We are not getting business owners themselves as quickly as we would like," said David Stone, another of the site's creators. "I think it's because it's a new concept and it will take time for them to get what we do, and we simply haven't pushed out a national marketing campaign."

Visitors to postacrime.com are greeted by a map of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia and a cluster of balloon markers around Seattle and Portland. Users click on the markers and pull up crimes in specific cities; or they can search the site by ZIP code.

But by clicking on the balloon clusters, users will find very little information. For example, while Seattle police respond to dozens of 911 calls in a given day, the site has only three entries asking for help finding Seattle bank-robbery suspects.

The site, which Sharpe says gets about 7,000 hits each month, includes crimes from Georgia, Texas and California.

Stone, Sharpe, Greg Isom and Adam Phillabaum remain employed in other jobs and work on the site in their free time.

Stone said the site is updated daily. Many of the newest items posted are incidents released by Bellevue police because the agency is one of the few departments that releases details about police call-outs to the public on a daily basis.

But Bellevue police spokesman Greg Grannis said he didn't know that information from his department was being posted on the site. He said the items being posted on postacrime.com are available to anyone who signs up for daily e-mails from the department.

Grannis said he's not pleased that the information the department is releasing — details about assaults, robberies, burglaries and other call-outs — is being posted. Grannis said the department likes to release the call information, not have it posted on someone's site.

"It's like anything else with the Internet. There's potentially good things that can come of it, but there are potential pitfalls," Grannis said. "I would caution people from posting anything without talking to criminal investigators first. The investigator might want to exhaust all leads before releasing photos and videos."

Seattle FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs also said she didn't know agency information was posted on the site and that the FBI is not sending details to the site.

"It doesn't hurt to get the information out there," Burroughs said.

Stone said postacrime.com is "just trying to provide a public service that's missing."

"We're not vigilantes, but we are people trying to help themselves," he said. "The police can only do so much."

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com