By Nate Anderson | Published: December 03, 2008 – 06:15AM CT

Say you need to solve an axe murder—what do you do? If you’re a detective in a 19th-century Russian novel, you play mind games with the unstable suspect until he turns himself in. If you’re a 21st-century cop, you check the head games at the office door and turn instead to databases, mashups, maps, and an Internet-connected public. Welcome to Crime and Punishment 2.0.

Organizations like the FBI have taken Internet tips for quite some time, using the Internet to replace paper submissions or phone calls, but cops are moving into new territory with a new set of tools. Massachusetts is getting “MassGangs,” a statewide database of gangbangers that includes pictures of tattoos and uses facial recognition software. Funded by a $1.2 million Department of Justice grant, the new system is designed to offer realtime gang information to cops, FBI agents, and prison officials, and it allows officers on the street to enter data from across the state.

Not everyone’s a fan; as one commenter on the Boston Globe article wrote, with more passion than grammar, “Its comforting to see that the police are discovering the newfangled technology thing called the ‘COMPUTER’ at last. have they been using pencils and paper all this time? That they are just NOW doing this is PITIFUL.”

Other police departments are moving beyond mere internal resources, hoping to both better provide their information to the public and get help from witnesses.

London’s Metropolitan Police, for instance, this summer rolled out a nifty mashup using Google Maps and the department’s own crime data. Rates of burglary, robbery, and vehicle crime are superimposed on a map of London; as visitors drill down from the borough to the ward to the sub-ward, the map presents more granular information about crime in the area.

Ars contributor and London resident Peter Bright assures us that crime in his neighborhood is “average,” though a lack of muggings has so far not freed him up to write the increasingly-mythical “Part IV” in his popular series of Windows/Mac articles.

But it’s the Toronto police who have recently unveiled one of the more interesting web 2.0-style experiments The department has thrown all of its homicide information online, including both current cases and cold cases. The pages include writeups on each case, along with media from the case such as maps, pictures of crime scenes, and even YouTube pleas from detectives and victims’ families. Each pages includes a form for submitting any additional tips about the cases.

Cold cases

But technology isn’t just for the cops; those wanting to beat the heat have also turned to web 2.0 for tools like the “speedtrap mashup,” a user-generated map of police speed traps across the US. An iPhone version is in the works.

Perhaps it’s time for someone to rewrite Raskolnikov’s story. How might a poor student living in overheated garret apartment commit his crime today… and how would the police track him down?