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Thursday, October 25, 2012

I used some new tools to investigate #Denver's #CrimeMap


To investigate missing crimes on Denver’s crime map, we used Microsoft Access. Here are just some of the missing crimes we discovered:
  • 2011 Robbery where someone snatched another person’s purse.
  • 2011 False imprisonment, kidnapping, sex assault with an object. DPD tells me the boyfriend of the victim was the bad guy.
  • 2011 A locked vehicle was stolen off the street.
  • 2010 Home burglary. The crooks stole electronics from the house.
  • 2010 Someone stole the radio from an unlocked car. (Lock your car people.)
  • 2010 The victim was starting arguments with people when DPD tells me a man approached the victim and stabbed him in the stomach.
  • 2009 DPD says the suspect forced his way into an apartment where he fondled one victim and physically assaulted another.
  • 2009 The suspect removed bikes from the garage and was confronted by the owner while placing the biles on top of the vehicle, DPD says. The suspect then got inot the vehicle and hit the victim while driving away.
To figure out which crimes were missing, we joined fields in the table and then told the program to give us all records where the join was NULL. 

It’s a bit of computer lingo. Here’s the easy way to think of it. We took a database of all crimes reported to DPD and took a database of all crimes that show up on crime mapper. 

Then we told the computer to, ‘Match all the records and then show me each record that did not join up with another.’

There were nearly 12,000 missing records in all.

The City of Denver says it is working to get the missing crimes to appear on the crime map.

To see what crimes are missing in your neighborhood, search the database created by 9NEWS here. Here’s a link to Denver’s crime map.

It’s amazing how much computer assisted reporting has changed a reporter’s life.