I checked out the website and while the information is (thankfully) current, it lacks the quick read nature of the the crime log. Upon searching by address, police district, or police service area, as well as date range, the crime statistics reporter is posted. To see where these crimes occurred, you then have to click the "view map" feature. When reading the earlier crime reports it was easy to do a quick scan to see of anything happened around my apartment. Now there is an extra step and the need to visit the website on a regular basis. Because of course DC is not using Google Maps (thus the need for screen grabs).
5 comments:
Grrr. Can't stand imagining how much money they invested in this silly custom mapping solution, when they could have gotten far better results by simply providing an XML feed of the data and waiting to see what sort of amazing mashups the community could come up with.
guess this means the crime logs posted in the current and intowner are going to be coming to an end then too, eh?
plus which, it doesn't tell you when crimes occurred, which is annoying
Re: Brad: not silly, and they not only provided an XML feed of the data, but also a KML feed for Google Maps and Earth, a CSV file for Excel and spreadsheet programs, and Atom feed and a custom download, which allows the user to specify date span, location (by ward, ANC, police district, PSA, neighborhood cluster, or BID) and even the results format. (CSV, KML, or XML).
Re: Anonymous: Any of the formats of data that you select will give you the time that the crime was reported - police reports will generally not give you the time that a crime actually occurred.
You can find the Crime Incidents page here: http://data.octo.dc.gov/NewCalendar.aspx?datasetid=3
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