Comments on: Ann Arbor’s Year in Crime

By: Andrew Turner

Andrew Turner — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:49:47 +0000

I uploaded the CSV to GeoCommons and quickly built this map: http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/2294

It would be interesting to pull in other local information such as police stations, and other demographics.

We’re also adding some features to the GeoCommons Maker maps that should make rendering faster.

A year ago I built a quick PDF scraper of the neighborhood watch reports – but the problem was the format changed every other week, so it was difficult/impossible to automate. I tried working some channels then, and there was interest, but then due to “budget” or other reasons people weren’t willing to discuss collaborating.

By: Dave Askins

Dave Askins — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:13:02 +0000

Virgil, The set of PDF's on the city's site had some gaps, which included the period during which your car was stolen. "The first two weeks of January and the last two weeks of December are not included." Depending on where is was stolen, it might show up on Dug Song's UmichCrime.org mentioned in the first comment.

By: Virgil

Virgil — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:03:17 +0000

Not showing the theft of my car from 1/11/08. I guess I must of lent it to a complete stranger without my knowledge. Or the keys.

By: Dug Song

Dug Song — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:29:33 +0000

Hey Dave,

I just sucked your spreadsheet into http://umichcrime.org so your canned 2008 AAPD incidents now show up alongside those pulled on demand from DPS. :-)

Seems that you’re missing a lot of data. I tried asking the AAPD for a clean, realtime dataset years ago to no avail (same with the AATA). Those PDFs look clean enough to scrape, though – maybe I’ll take a look when I get some time…