June 13, 2008Crime data updated: 200 missing Roanoke County offenses addedIf you live in Roanoke County and you've been checking our Roanoke Valley crime data map and search for crime in your area, you might want to look again. Working with the Roanoke County Police, we discovered that the crime data in our database did not include about 200 offenses reported between December 30, 2007 and June 7, 2008. My source for the county's crime data is a weekly report of serious violent and property crime the department publishes on the web. Since the police began posting it weekly at the beginning of the year, it went up on Tuesday afternoon and covered offenses from the previous week. What was invisible in the report is that some offenses that happen in that week aren't included because, for a variety of reasons, the reports aren't always filed in the same week. Sometimes, for example, a supervisor might kick a report back to an officer for revisions, causing a delay in the report's completion. We compared the offenses in my database with those the department could find in its, and found I was lacking something like 40 percent of them. The department graciously agreed to provide me with a complete listing so I could complete our database, which I did this morning. That brings the total number of offenses in the database for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem to over 1,300. Going forward, the police will now post their report on Thursday instead of Tuesday to allow time for more delayed reports to get into the system and be included. In addition, I will periodically ask them the run a query to catch offenses that slipped through the regular reports. So, whatever gets missed will be caught eventually. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we can manage right now within the realities of what it takes for the police to produce these records. And to their great credit, the department and Lt. Chuck Mason have shown great concern for presenting a complete and accurate record in these reports. The long and short of it is, now you know what you've been missing. |
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