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Crime knows no boundaries. Outlaws don't pay much attention to what city or county they're standing in, I don't image. Increasingly, our crime mapping knows no boundaries, either. Yesterday, we added a map of reported crime in Salem toour line up of crime maps in Roanoke and Roanoke County.

Many thanks to the Salem Police Department who three weeks ago, in response to community and press interest, began releasing a felony crime report with addresses down to the block number, which is good enough to map.

So, we now have mapped crime from the entire core of the Roanoke Valley, but, as the consumer, you're not getting a full apples-to-apples to comparison. That's because Salem's report includes all felonies, where the Roanoke and Roanoke County reports cover Part I crimes as defined for FBI uniform crime reporting. That's basically major violent and property crimes. Salem's report includes all that, plus drug offenses and a range of other things like fraud, bad checks, eluding police and on and on.

On one hand, the community's getting a little more information from Salem, though Salem seems to have less to report in general.

On the other, merging all this crime onto one searchable map -- which is a place we're headed to -- is difficult. We could always make the editorial decision here in my shop of mapping only the Salem offenses that correspond to those available in Roanoke and Roanoke County, which would keep things fair.

What do you think? I'd like your thoughts on it so the maps we build ultimately work best for you, the reader.

For now, check out the Salem map, which you'll notice right away is different from the others. All the markers are one color. That's because there's not a set list of offenses that could appear in the report. The list of possibilities is way longer than the available colors for the markers. So, they're all red and you'll just have to click to see what each is for now.

The first thing I noticed is, compared to the rather obvious pockets of criminal activity on other maps, Salem has remarkably even distribution of crime. Looked at one way, no part of Salem is exempt from the nefarious doings of the criminal element. Looked at another, there's little enough crime and spread so thinly, there doesn't seem to be a "bad" part of town.

There's only three weeks worth of data on the map, though, and once we get more, a different pattern could emerge.