Baltimore residents now have a new way to see exactly what is going on up and down their own blocks. A block-level interactive crime dashboard lets people scan where violent and property incidents have been reported across the city, drilling down to specific streets and corners. The maps and tables focus on short-term trends over the last several weeks so users can quickly check what has been reported near their homes, workplaces, or businesses. The numbers come from police incident reports, so they reflect what officers logged at the scene rather than what ultimately happened in court.
As reported by The Baltimore Sun on Wednesday, the newsroom rolled out a “Data and maps” package that lays out tables and heat maps for violent offenses and property crimes, both citywide and by neighborhood. The Sun’s dashboard pulls together the city’s weekly incident files so readers can zoom in on individual blocks and compare recent activity from one area to another.
How The Maps Are Built
The dashboard is built from the Baltimore Police Department’s NIBRS Group A incident dataset, which the city updates every week and which records incident-level details and multiple offenses for a single event, according to Open Baltimore. The department also explains its switch to NIBRS and a breakdown of what each field means on its NIBRS information page.
Why The Numbers Can Look Strange
Some of the dashboard counts can shift depending on how incidents are coded. For clarity, the maps label as “shootings” those aggravated assaults or robberies in which someone was non-fatally shot. That choice can make totals for certain other offense categories appear lower than people might expect. As The Baltimore Sun explains, the dashboard follows FBI groupings along with the city’s own decisions about how to present and label incidents.
How To Read The Map Without Overreacting
The dashboard ties an offense to the spot where it was reported, not to where a victim or suspect lives, so it should not be treated as a map of residents. Records that could not be geocoded are left out of the public files altogether, a caveat spelled out in the dataset metadata at Open Baltimore. Researchers and local leaders caution that a short-window heat map is a starting point for questions and follow-up, not a final verdict on whether a neighborhood is safe or unsafe…