Somerville police activity

[pythonpowered.livejournal.com]

wallacestreet has been putting up maps of the Somerville Police activity I thought I might help by adding this weeks map. 

http://www.secret8gent.com/map/crimedata.php

I'm not sure how popular these maps will be so I may need to move this link to another server.

Also google maps geocoding works OK but it fails regularly on a fair number of addresses in Somerville (as has been discussed).  I ended up using a combination of google's api and the yahoo api to do the geocoding.  Basically switching to yahoo whenever google returned a zip code that wasn't in Somerville, but this still isn't perfect.

There are several options at the top of the page - you can:
- Change the date range
- Check / Uncheck  the different crime types
- Change the time range (all day vs Midnight - 6am, 6am to Noon, Noon - 6pm and 6pm - Midnight)

Let me know what you guys think.

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I often wonder about the details behind each of these incidents. The major ones are covered in the police blog (see sville_police), but most are minor.

I happen to have witnessed one of the incidents of "motor vehicle vandalism": a small child threw some rocks into the air that happened to land on a car as it drove by.

[Edited to fix typo. Sorry about that.]

[motive-nuance.livejournal.com]

What's "needle"?

[zenala.livejournal.com]

I was wondering the same thing... drug needle, perhaps?

[pythonpowered.livejournal.com]

I updated the page a little so that should be more descriptive now.
Needle Watch is a found hypodermic needle.

[ron_newman]

And I thought we had a crocheting epidemic.

Date Range

[pythonpowered.livejournal.com]

Oh and so folks don't need to guess - the dates go back through Dec 29, 2008.

[wallacestreet.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that! I was hoping someone would do a better job than I do. The dates feature is great. Now we just need to convince the Journal to do it itself or at least to publish their data in a more convenient format...

[pythonpowered.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I'd played with the google api before, but hadn't done any large scale geocoding. It was a little challenging due to the formatting issues you mentioned, and some peculiarities with google's goecoding - also google doesn't want you to geocode over 2500 addresses a day.

I've made a few changes here and there since first posting - the full descriptions are in the info boxes instead of just date, time and type of incident.

Hopefully it's useful - feel free to offer suggestions on how it could be more so.

[veronique4.livejournal.com]

This is an super idea. Yes, a couple of local papers also post this info, but it should be easy to view at-a-glance like this. keep it going? Thank you.