August 02, 2005
Crimes in Berkeley? Where?
I'm a long-time devotee of Richard Brenneman of the Berkeley Daily Planet's controversial but always entertaining Police Blotter, and oft quoted Berkeley Police Department Public Information Officer Joe "just the facts" Okies, but I am often curious about exactly where the crimes reported upon took place. The city of Berkeley used to publish great crime maps, but gave up updating them in 2003, for reasons that aren't clear to me. Now all they publish is a daily list of "Police Bulletins", as individual PDF files, the least accessible format imaginable.
To the rescue come Scott Brodsky and Google. In a brilliant mashup, Scott has automated a process for getting the data from the Berkeley police bulletins, and used the Google Maps API to layer the locations of the reported crimes on a Google map of Berkeley on his site, Incidentlog.com.
Check out the screenshot I took. Looks to me like Ashby between 80 and Telegraph has had a bit of a crime problem in the last month. You can even click on a marker, and get details of the crime. RSS feeds to come, writes Scott. Check the site out, fellow police blotter junkies.
Cross-posted from the Berkeley Blog
Posted by tim at August 2, 2005 11:34 PMThe city of Berkeley used to publish great crime maps, but gave up updating them in 2003, for reasons that aren't clear to me
The previous crime maps were updated by hand. This was a labor intensive process and the officer in charge couldn't handle the load on top of her other duties. Sometimes the site would not be updated for months at a time. The Police Department abandoned the Crime Maps in favor of the new "Police Bulletins" PDF system.
Personally, I find the PDFs to be unintelligible, and I was also working on some perl scripts to show the locations, types of crimes, etc on Google Maps. I'm only 10% done though, so I'm glad someone else did it!
Posted by: Stefan Lasiewski at August 3, 2005 11:55 AMhey this is pretty interesting stuff! is there some sort of key so civilians can interpret what happened at each scene?
anyone know if there is anything like thise for traffic crashes?
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