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Dorchester and Mattapan crime mapping
By adamg on Mon, 05/04/2009 - 9:24pm
The Dorchester Reporter just went live with detailed crime maps for most of Dorchester and Mattapan. They're based on daily incident reports from Areas C-11 and B-3 and they have a lot more incidents than the maps I've been doing here.
Full disclosure: Yes, I built the maps (it's pretty cool what you can do with Drupal these days). If you have any suggestions - or find anything wrong - let me or the Reporter folks know!
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Ad:
Comments
oops
The 30-day robbery map includes one in Kyrgyzstan (it's true it is near the border).
Oh, you mean East Dorchester?
Fixed, thanks!
It can be challenging mapping Boston addresses (how many Washington Streets do we have?). But that was the most far out address I've seen.
nice
These maps rock. Interesting to see all the stuff happening in my 'hood...
"Interesting"?
But I thought the obituaries was the "Irish sports page"...
Raw data feeds available?
Do you have the raw data feeds available?
This is great stuff, don't get me wrong (not the crimes, but the map visualization). But it shouldn't be too hard to also expose the underlying dataset as a feed or link, so that others can make their own mashups of the data.
Right now, you've (or DotNews?) done the hard part: taking the raw human written police reports, and categorizing and localizing/plotting them. Google Maps makes it easy to visualize that, true; but there might be other local readers who want to mashup different kinds of maps.
I know, I could probably figure out the data source by pulling apart the javascript, but I figured it would be easy to expose a little REST-y list of URLs that would feed up the raw data for others to mashup pretty easily from what you already have.
Thx for the work overall!
Give us a couple of weeks
Cool idea and I'm sure folks could come up with some interesting applications for the data. But we need to make sure we've worked out all the kinks on our end first before we look at releasing raw data (I'm thinking specifically of the address geocoding, but we might run into some other things, too).
you should include crime on the T too.
See Transit Police for that and...while you're at it...get the stats for the Soutwest Corridor (state PD). By making your map more comprehensive it will give people a visual of what is really going on in Boston. You never really see this bird's-eye view of the crime on the news, this is a good idea. I have found that people really don't know how dangerous a place is until they are a victim of a crime. Now, with your "crime map" they can see where they have to be more careful.
Thanks
And, especially in Dorchester, we should see about State Police records.
what jurisdiction do they have there?
Besides Morrissey and Gallivan Blvds, I don't know what their jurisdiction is in Dorchester. In Roxbury they have the Southwest corridor. Which, I think, they really only patrol on overtime with money given to the state by some semi-private organizations (like PMAC for SW Corridor). Or some other special money. What is up with that? Is it true that they don't patrol their areas (like Revere Beach) unless they get this outside money? Anyone?