January 18, 2008Roanoke County crime mapped now, tooOur Roanoke City crime map now has company from Roanoke County. Just this week, the Roanoke County police department began posting weekly crime reports that are basically uniform to those posed by the Roanoke City Police Department that are the basis for the city crime map. So, having figured out the city map, it was easy to duplicate the process for the county data. The county has long published a monthly report of all kinds of offenses on its website, but it wasn't always posted in a timely fashion. The change this week not only offered the possibility of a map, but the chance to be fair to Roanoke. Now you can see the same offenses mapped for both localities and make fair comparisons. Currently, the county map looks somewhat bare compared to the city one, but that's in large part because the county map has only two weeks worth of offenses, compared to five weeks of city data. Valerie, in a comment today, asked how we got this rolling finally. The first part was, the crime data became available on a regular basis in a form we could use. The second part was me finding ways to maximize my minimal know-how for the technical part of this job. In short, I learned how to use a free web-based mapping utility, called mapbuilder.net, to plot large numbers of addresses simultaneously. That allowed for a level of efficiency in building these maps that made doing them make sense. Really, it's not that hard. If a thick-headed, retro-fitted newspaper man like me can figure out, it must be easy. |
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Comments
[January 18, 2008 6:47 PM]
SteveThanks, this will be very beneficial in the future. One question, why are you doing it and not the county. With property assesments going up 8-15% a year the money is there.
[January 18, 2008 9:45 PM]
MattGlad you like it, Steve. As far as the county not mapping this themselves, I can't speak for them, and I haven't asked their reasons. I can say that as far as Roanoke goes, City Manager Darlene Burcham despises the NW/SW/NE/SE quadrant system for street addresses in the city because of the way some quadrants are stigmatized. The city crime report doesn't include the quadrants for that reason. So, it would follow that the city administration would also not be crazy about the idea of putting offenses on a map so people can see where they are clustered. I don't know of county officials having similar concerns, but I suppose it's possible. By and large, from what I've seen, police departments rarely map their own crime for public viewing. I could speculate that they might think sharing such crime analysis might risk inhibiting their ability to solve and prevent crimes, but it would only be speculation. More cynically, you might think they just don't want the public to know exactly how much crime is going on in their community because it might seem to reflect on the police department's effectiveness. But the fact that they are sharing the data in a different form would run against the secrecy theory, wouldn't it?
[January 19, 2008 9:25 AM]
Ed S.Oh don't get me started again. I guess CM Burcham also feels that being arrested stigmatizes certain persons...so let's just let them run free...
Matt, serious question for you. What happened to the "recent entries" links for the Datablog (and other blogs) on the main blog page. Right now I only see them for a few (the Outdoors blog, and maybe one other). It's been like that for about a week. Any idea if it will be fixed soon?
[January 19, 2008 4:06 PM]
MattI don't have a clue, Ed. Hadn't noticed the change myself. I'll pass your question on to our online editor, though. Thanks.