Somerville police activity April 19-25

[wallacestreet.livejournal.com]

I've often wanted a map of the Somerville Journal data and now I have one. And so do you.

Comments

[ron_newman]

Thanks. Can you tell us how you made this map, and whether you have an automated process to produce new ones each week?

"Robbery at 197 Elm St" -- geez, how much money can you get from a Subway anyway?

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Ron, you can put info into a spreadsheet and upload it at http://www.batchgeo.com/ and you can probably pull the data from the report online as a tab separated file and import it into the spreadsheet.

I did this back in January of 08, after my car was broken into near lexington park - I started tracking the car break ins in the area, trying to determine if there were any trends.

[ron_newman]

I don't see the link to get the report as a CSV file -- where did you find it?

[wallacestreet.livejournal.com]

I copied and pasted from the Journal website, used a bunch of regular expressions to massage it into a nice table, then uploaded to batchgeo. It could easily be automated in Perl or whatever. You'd want to scrape the journal website every week, and I may get around to it, but I mostly wanted to test the batchgeo website. I'd be happy to share the RegEx's if someone else wants to code it, but maybe the Journal should do it itself. Now that would be value added.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Let me correct myself - there ISN'T a link to a csv, I usually saved the webpage, opened it in notepad, and edited the data into a tab separated format, then open THAT with excel.

Yes, there is probably an automated way to do it, but I don't know it - I'm not a programmer or spreadsheet expert, just an occasional intelligence analyst.

[trtls.livejournal.com]

And.....we're getting a new one each week? Very nice. I'm glad to see my street and surrounding streets largely unaffected!

East Somerville mostly affected...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Winter Hill area?...

[misterthorn.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing it. I started doing this myself in September, actually, after a wave of breakins in my then-neighborhood (by hand, without any of these new fangled regexes you kids are using these days). Your way seems much easier. Not so easy I think you or me or any one volunteer should do it, but your comment above makes me wonder: why ISN'T some local media outlet ALREADY doing this?

Re: East Somerville mostly affected...

[soundlab1.livejournal.com]

I couldn't believe a friend of mine who lived not too far from Davis telling me his car had been broken into twice, but he was right on the edge of all this in East Somerville...