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.

Other Searches

By Blotter New

Crime Watch New Orleans pulls incident data from the Times-Picayune’s Police Blotter reports. The Blotter link lists all of the Police Blotter reports to date; you can then view all of the incidents that were listed in a particular report. The incidents are presented in the same text-only format as the Police Blotter report; you can click through to the map page for a specific incident.

In some cases Crime Watch New Orleans is unable to interpret a particular report; these incidents are displayed in red and the reason for the failure (‘no block number listed,’ ‘unable to geocode address’, etc.) can be viewed by hovering over the incident text.

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.