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Searching Crime Watch New Orleans

10 Dec 2008 by Rob Schafer

Crime Watch New Orleans gives you a number of ways to examine where and when crime is taking place.

Pre-defined Searches

A number of quick searches are linked to in the navigation bar that runs across the top of the page:

By Council District, Neighborhood, Police District, Street, or Ward

These are geographically-constrained searches that show you incidents that have occurred within a particular area of the city (or along a particular street.) Click on any of the links in the navigation bar to view an index page listing all of the areas of the type you’ve selected. From there you can select an individual area (or street) to get By default you are shown the twelve most recent incidents but you can also view incidents in the last week, month, year as well as every incident recorded.

By Type and Date

These searches are city-wide and show you all incidents of a particular type (say, aggravated assaults) or on a particular day. As with area searches you are shown the most recent twelve incidences by default.

Customized Searches

In cases where you need more detail than the pre-defined searches provide you can define your own custom searches.

NOTE: Crime Watch New Orleans does not track data submitted for custom searches in any way. Any addresses or search criteria you enter are only used to generate search results.

By Address New

Click on the Address link in the navigation bar to search for incidents within one-half mile of a particular address (for instance, City Hall.)

Advanced Search New

The Advanced Search page (available via the “Search” link in the upper right-hand corner of the page) gives you the most flexibility. You can search by a date and/or time range and you can also qualify the search by any number of areas or incident types. This allows you to perform complicated queries, such as: every robbery in the French Quarter this November that occurred between midnight and 6 A.M.

Notifications

In most cases Crime Watch New Orleans generates an RSS feed corresponding to the search you’ve selected. If you’re using an RSS reader you can just click on the icon that is displayed in all pages that produce RSS. If you’re using Google Reader you can simply paste the search page’s URL into Google Reader’s “Subscribe” box.

NOPD First District Email Blasts

03 Dec 2008 by Rob Schafer

NOPD First District has joined the Second and Third Districts in issuing email blasts via Google Groups.

Crime Watch New Orleans scans a variety of sources – NOPD District email blasts as well as many local mainstream media sites – and links incidents to articles where possible. Incidents with such links are displayed in listings with a small paper-clip icon.

Update: Well, I’m a bit behind the times, apparently. As of November ALL EIGHT NOPD Districts are using Google Groups! For more information and to subscribe to email or RSS updates you can visit each District’s page:

Keeping Count

14 Oct 2008 by Rob Schafer

Tracking Multiple Incidents

Placing pins on a map is a simple and easily-understood way to relate an incident to its surroundings but this approach has can break down when the number of incidents in a given area increases. One problem I’ve encountered is that multiple pins placed in the same location obscure each other, causing the map to appear to contain fewer incidents than it actually does.

As of today the site now handles multiple incidents at an address by placing a single large grey pin on the address; clicking on the pin will show all of the events in a ‘tabbed’ popup window. This works best in for maps that contain a large number of incidents:

All reported incidents in the French Quarter

Data Fidelity

Viewing incidents in this fashion reveals that many incidents are reported more than once; for instance, in this view of Adams Street it seems obvious to me that the two incidents at Adams & Hampson St are duplicates. One was reported on September 25 and the other on September 27. As of today 458 of the 4,993 incidents in the Crime Watch New Orleans database appear to be duplicates. For now I am displaying them as reported but I plan to flag or remove them entirely at some point.

Welcome to Crime Watch New Orleans

11 Sep 2008 by Rob Schafer

I am pleased to announce the launch of Crime Watch New Orleans, a website devoted to helping the citizens of New Orleans track criminal activity in the city. It is hoped that this site will become a useful resource for everyone interested in tracking the occurrence of crime near their homes, businesses and throughout the city.

Site design and implementation actually began early last year after rising crime rates prompted a citizen march on City Hall; at this point, it was clear that crime was of paramount concern to the citizenry and that people needed information about what was happening around them. Design and implementation proceeded quickly enough but the site was fettered by the lack of a reliable source of crime data; ultimately, it was decided that publishing incomplete and/or inaccurate data would be unhelpful and work on the site was suspended in mid-2007.

However, in May of 2008 the New Orleans Police Department agreed to provide incident reports to The Times-Picayune, the city’s daily newspaper, which has been publishing them ever since. These incident reports are used by Crime Watch New Orleans to populate the site’s crime maps, which are updated as new incident reports become available.

The site is a work-in-progress; new features are planned and will be announced on this blog as they are completed. Bugs in existing features will be fixed as quickly as possible. Please feel free to contact me to report any issues encountered while using this site. Suggestions for new features are welcome as well!