Monday, October 6, 2008

Word.

"I have a problem with a private company getting information that should be freely available to the public and getting [taxpayer] money for it!"

Seriously.

Why should individual taxpayers have to threaten a lawsuit to track down basic neighborhood safety info that should be free and accessible to everyone?

5 comments:

protector said...

Homeland data is accessible to everyone. Just check SpotCrime.com. We have over 30,000 incidents mapped.

bosconet said...

While spot crime is a great resource I think the point still stands the government should be providing the raw data for anyone to use for whatever they want.

Oh and not just crime data, how about city/state appropriations, housing code violations, fire data, etc.

ppatin said...

Lots of shooting going on last night. Two dead and three injured, at least one critically.

graham said...

Colin d: Is there any way to verify that a selected date range on Spotcrime actually contains crime data for that entire date range?

Just coincidentally, I am looking at several houses for sale in Homeland (as well in Towson) and have been using Spotcrime to get a better idea of the crime situation. When selecting a long date range such as 1/08 - 10/08, it appears historical data for Baltimore City is available (since it appears on the map) while areas in Baltimore County only show the last few months worth of incidents, even with the date range extended back further.

Knowing what the active data range is of the data would be very helpful in order to give me a better historical perspective on crime types and volume across different neighborhoods.

And just as an aside, based on a casual comparison of the data, crime does not appear to be all that much worse in Homeland than it is in West Towson or Stoneligh...

Maurice Bradbury said...

30,000 incidents in Homeland?!
So how are you getting your data, is the Northern giving it to you, I hope?