HCS Blog

All of the tables have been “cleaned” and data should be consistent now.  Database has been updated with January and February crime stats.

I’ve finally finished getting all the data imported and geocoded. There were a few months with obvious spikes in data, and a closer look revealed a bunch of weird dates. Such as 1976, 2000, etc. I can only guess these are erroneously entered dates which are normally filtered out… After cleaning those out it looks much better, and I will go back at some point to verify the other months don’t have such junk added in - but in the meantime it’s really not hurting anything.

I’ve also changed the monthly history graph and data to display a daily average instead of monthly totals. This makes the output more fair considering months can have anything from 26-31 days so it previously could appear a month was better or worse than another when it might actually not have been.

This coming weekend I should get some headway on bringing back a maps interface and will add premise stats and some other interesting data I think will be appealing. I doubt it will be done this weekend considering I have several other plans already - not to mention puppy-sitting for some newly-wed friends who will be on their honeymoon.

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

I’m moving the site to a different server - for more room and speed.

I haven’t had time to add much, except that all the data from Jan 2005 through Dec 2006 is now online and I’m re-geocoding each month using the new process to increase the number of entries with coordinates.

As mentioned in the very first post, the map interface has been removed - currently you are only able to receive a historical graph along with numbers of the total incidents for each month. Once I finish getting all the data re-geocoded and then get all of 2007’s data imported and geocoded, I will begin working on a new maps interface as well as more details and breakdown of the results for your inquiring minds.

Stay tuned!

I’ve updated some of the checks the geocoding process uses, as well as added a google maps API geocode lookup, with several different tests (mostly for wording/spelling, same as what I use for geocoder.us - such as changing FWY to Freeway)

I’m getting much better results now, and will go back and re-check the entries with no coordinates to see if I can bring down the failure percentage rates. I’m adding a DB Stats link on the home page so you can see the total number of records for a given month, along with the number of records that have no geocode info - and the resulting failure rate.