When we started the DataSphere, we knew online crime data would be a staple of what we offered. Crime and where it happens are important indicators of quality of life and the level of safety in a community -- not to mention just good ol' nosey stuff people like to know about.

We've been offering crime data for months now, and have moved from our first static-but-clickable maps for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem to searchable databases with mapped results.

Now, we're closing in on full crime data coverage for the heart of The Roanoke Times circulation area.

Last week, we added data for Radford, and today, data for Montgomery Couny is now online.

As always, the offering is only as good as the data we get. We have to start someplace, so there's not a ton of data available, but as time passes, the databases wil become richer and more informative.

The Montgomery County map -- built and maintained by Online Production Editor Jim Ellison, who works in our New River Valley bureau -- shows misdemeanors and felonies recorded by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. It doesn't include offenses reported to the Christiansburg and Blacksburg police department.

We may never have every place covered, but this is a pretty darn good start. It's valuable information which, if you pay attention to it, can help you live your life in the best and safest way. Check it out, and as always, let us know what you think.

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Today, the city of Roanoke is once again auctioning off properties on which there are unpaid local real estate taxes, assessments for weed and trash abatement, and demolition or board up costs. They do this once or twice a year. More than 30 properties are on the auction block this time, a number of which are vacant lots.

You can see the list on the city's department of billings and collections website, and there are photos on the Woltz and Associates site.

But I wondered where they were, so I tossed the list onto a map:

No surprises here, really. It's the more depressed parts of town where the pinpoints fall. But part of the story might be in where there aren't any pinpoints.

As Roanoke blogger and neighborhood activist Chris Muse points out, the presence of delinquent properties "a fairly good sign of the progression or regression of a neighborhood."

Chris is rightly proud that there's a single delinquent property on the list this time in his part of Old Southwest. I know that property, and while I haven't asked Chris, I wonder if some aren't glad to see that vacant property seeing some action and the potential for a new owner to make it a credit to the neighborhood, and not a blight on it.

That, after all, is what the city says it's up to with these tax sales. It might be a bad sign when your neighborhood is host to landowners who can't or won't pay their taxes or maintain their properties. But everytime one of those properties is turned over to a new owners, it's a new chance for the land, the house, and the neighborhood.

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It's called a database, which could hardly sound more indifferent, or more inhuman. But go digging into the database of information on graves in the old and overgrown Springwood Burial Park in Roanoke, once Roanoke's premier, private all-black cemetary, and you'll find way more than hard, unfeeling statistics.

This is lives, stories, deep heartache and grief that speak to you from cells in a spreadsheet.

Roberta P. Turner, died in 1938. Her stone reads, "TILL WE MEET AGAIN." Two years later, her daughter Ruth, 17, died, too. Her stone reads, with solemn determination, "I WILL FOLLOW."

Levi Barber Jr. lived but 15 years, from August 26, 1923, to a week before Christmas in 1938. The pain his death inflicted is carved right into the stone in the words, "MOTHER'S DARLING."

All credit for this fascinating piece of history goes to Robert Bird, the retired Roanoke municpal auditor who with a troop of Boy Scouts has made clearing the graveyard a mission, along with documenting the identities of more than 1,000 people who found their last resting place there between 1937 and 1979.

Roanoke Times columnist Shanna Flowers wrote about the effort in a column in Tuesday's paper.

So far, Bird has identified the occupants of 289 graves, and catalogued all of the information he's gathered in a meticulous spreadsheet he graciously shared with me so I could put it online for people to search.

The first idea was that people who have relatives buried there might learn a little something, or just as good, share some information with Bird.

But anybody might find themselves pulled into this history in columns and rows.

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Roanoke's population, like that every other urban center in Virginia, has been in decline for a couple of decades now. But, as reported by Jay Conley in today's paper, estimates from the respected Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service indicate that for the last two years, the city's population has actually increased by a total of 833 people.

The bleeding appears to have been stemmed, but what remains unclear (and forgive me for belaboring the metaphor) is what or who is supplying the clot.

Continue reading "Roanoke's growing, but how, and where?" »

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Roanoke City Council will get a scheduled five-minute briefing on "2007 Crime Statistics Police Initiatives" during its 2 p.m. meeting today, according to the agenda posted online. I have no idea what this means, but any talk of crime stats stirs interest on this blog and in the DataSphere, so I thought I'd pass it on.

If you lack the time or interest to actually go to the council meeting (and, really, I or anyone would forgive you for either of those excuses), you can check out a live video feed of the meeting, or view it later by going here.

You can also watch this space for a run-down of what was discussed later today.

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Our 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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After Roanoke Times reporter Amanda Codispoti showed me a database a few months ago of contracts between professional solicitors and public safety-related charities that revealed the huge portion of funds the solicitors keep, I got curious.

Is it only rescue squads and volunteer fire departments who are cutting these kinds of deals?

It's not.

We now have available in the DataSphere a database of over 4,000 contracts between solicitors and charities of all kinds and sizes, running from January 2000 to June 2007, and the pattern is the same.

These contracts raised nearly $2.1 billion, according to the data from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which keeps the tallies. The solicitors kept about $1 billion of it.

It didn't matter much if the charity was a local Civitan Club or UNICEF.

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