(Colin of Spotcrime.com has helpfully mapped all of those shootings, see right -- MJB)
On Friday night, we had nine shootings in less than five hours. Two of those were fatal.
On Saturday morning, some dude was found on Hamilton Ave. with a bullet hole somewhere in his body. He's not being called a murder victim yet.
A few hours before that, a robber shot himself in the leg as he was trying to rob someone in the 400 block of E. 33rd St. (Heh. That's pretty funny, actually. Too bad more of our robbers don't do that.)
Early Sunday morning, a man and woman were shot after a fight at the Rush Hour Bar & Grill on Liberty Rd., and police are seeking someone who looks like something.
Father's Day went to shit yesterday when papa went all Marvin Gaye Sr. on his growed-up boy in Carney.
Early this morning, a man was shot twice in the 3000 block of Denison St. near Lake Ashburton. He's being treated at Sinai, in case you want to send flowers or a little cuddly teddy bear or something.
Okay, I think that takes care of the shootings. On to other news.
Naham Perry, a cop at University of Maryland Eastern Shore, has been charged with getting his perv on with a 15-year-old girl. It's the second time he's been charged with being unable to control himself around young teenage girls.
Two cold cases in Baltimore County were ruled as homicides. One case involves the strangulation of 18-year-old Joyce Rein in 1975, and the other is for the strangulation of 23-year-old Natalie Williams in 1982. Both women can be linked to convicted murderer Harold Houndshell, who would be charged in their deaths if he hadn't died in 1999.
More on the HoCo PD shooting in Jessup in April, including the fact that the second teen who was shot also might not be charged with any criminal activity.
If they shut down vital bus lines in AAC because they're too violent, can they just shut down the entire city of Baltimore for the same reason?
Two baggage handlers for AirTran at BWI have been charged with stealing people's luggage.
Sad: An investigation into the death of Jarrell Gray of Frederick found that he was not wearing a hearing aid when he was Tasered for not following the commands of a sheriff’s deputy.
This just in: eating at lyin'-ass Applebee's will make you 6% fatter than you'd planned on being.
11 comments:
Whoa!!
Where does spotcrime get its info?
This is not a simple "scrape" off of the Baltimore police crime map. It has exact street addresses, not just "3XX block of whatever st".
How did they do that???
I just LOVE the incisive commentary from our Mayor, regarding the recent shooting spree:
"but sometimes when it is a full moon, it seems to get crazier."
I guess I should be grateful that at least she's not advocating that the shooters are victims themselves, who had lousy childhoods and are just in need of some love and acceptance and social programs, at which point they'll all put away their guns and start getting along, like good boys and girls.
where are you seeing the addresses, Helix?
Float your cursor over the crime icons. The addresses sometimes appear.
The problem with Spotcrime is that it should indicate how very selective its data inclusions can be. Some very dicy areas appear to have no crime activity, because they're not being actively chronicled.
"Exhibit A" is interesting, the new online spinoff of the Daily Record. I'll have to start checking that one.
John - we pull from both news and Police sources. If you've got another source we should pull from, we are open to suggestion. We've got 23,000 incidents mapped back to June of 2007.
I also use the Crime Log in the Baltimore Messenger, which weekly publishes the Northern District's blotter, more or less intact.
You might be able to get the daily sheets faxed from each district HQ. My experience is that they start omitting daily sheets quickly, because the officer assigned gets behind in his/her paperwork and citizen reporting is the first thing to go.
You should be aware that Richard Irwin's partial blotter is quite incomplete. Consequently, there are big chunks of territory on your map which appear far, far safer than they are.
I'd recommend that a caveat appear on the legend.
If for instance you kinda know that your data only include 3 of 5 days' data on average for some neighborhood, you could code that neighborhood in progressively darker monochrome tones to indicate the intensity of reporting.
The reader therefore would understand that he needs to (heuristically) scale up the incident counts by the reciprocal coefficient (ie. multiply by 1.667) to rectify the impression from the map.
Now, this method corrects only for omission from official data, not for failure to record (by responding officers) nor failure (by victims) to report. Correcting for those effects is quite complex, not the least because the BCPD discounts them. (Independent victim surveys show they are very, very significant, especially in inner-city settings.)
Why am I raising the point?
A community adjacent to Homewood/Hopkin/Charles Village got a rude awakening last week when some of its residents claimed the area was almost crimeless (per Spotcrime) and were then presented the incident data, including five incidents in as many days on a couple of blocks of just one street.
They were kinda shocked to see the BCPD cumulative crime map.
I'm just sayin' .....
Ultimately, the police department is the best source for information like this. I totally agree with the philosophy of spotcrime. It is the business of the police department to focus on crime and NOT on contracting with third parties for dowdy web 1.0 webapps.
Oh, I just noticed the baltimore police department has "re-skinned" the css on their crime map query. Nice, but the "1998" look still remains in the mapping page.
It is in their (the police departments') best interests to cough up the data in a consistent and accessible way (eg, a "bare-bones" table query) and let the general public and other entities find ways of mashing up and making sense of the data.
I'm not sure what the point is being made about SpotCrime. We pull data mostly from the PD not the Baltimore Sun. Are you saying that the Baltimore Police Department is underreporting?
Regarding Homewood, we've mapped over 70 incidents in Homewood in the last two months.
http://spotcrime.com/md/baltimore/homewood
Why would anyone infer safety from that?
I'm available at colin (at) spotcrime.com if you'd like to understand our methods better.
Colin,
I think spotcrime is doing a great job. I was referring to the existing baltimore crime map which is on the BCPD website. Aside from the obvious retro-interface with the inspid legal disclaimer, I think that the BCPD would do better to simply make all of their crime stats available in a way that is easy processed by organizations like spotcrime, or whomever else wants to have the raw data.
That way, they would not have to burden themselves with the "yak-shaving" exercise of contracting with a specific company to make a idiosyncratic crime-mapping webapp that only applies to Baltimore city.
BTW, how do you get the data from BCPD?
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