Boston crime data

By adamg - 12/4/05 - 11:31 pm

On Friday, I got a copy of a Boston Police Department spreadsheet with tons of specific crime-report data for the city of Boston for the month of November - more than 2,500 reported crimes, from theft of license plates to murder.

The geek in my says "cool!" The Boston resident in me says "oh, man, that's depressing" (and Boston's still far better off than some places, such as Baltimore). In any case, I've started building pages based on the data, which you can see at Boston Crime (yes, this is a different URL than the one I posted the other day).

It's wicked barebones at this point, because I had to spend a good part of the weekend correcting mistakes by the converter I used - which is the fault not of the API I accessed but the fault of a 350-year-old city that has numerous neighborhoods with streets named the same, grr, am I sick of latitudes and longitudes right about now.

But enough carping. Still quite a bit of work to do: I need to get maps up for all the neighborhoods and more types of crimes. Longer term, I need to build a database both to make importing and manipulating the data easier and to make all the data searchable on various criteria. Suggestions welcome! And if you want to play with the data yourself, download the spreadsheet (it's a 340k Excel file).