Does every city have one of these?
http://essentials.baltimoresun.com/micro_sun/homicides/
It’s an interactive map of the city (powered by google) tracking the city’s murders to date.
Each year as New Year’s approaches, the residents of Baltimore are nightly informed of how many murders have been committed in the city thus far. It always totals somewhere around 300, and I guess the nightly updates from news anchors serve to let us know whether or not we managed to squeak through a year without going over 300. (There are, technically, 650,000 residents of Baltimore, making that an approximate 1 murder for every 2,167 residents).
So, the Baltimore Sun, obviously needing to press into the digital age, has taken advantage of google maps to create an easy and interactive way to track homicides in Charm City. Charming, isn’t it?
You can filter by year, district, and zip code. You can also choose between genders if you want to just see the men who were killed, or just the women, or all. You can select by race and even hone it down by cause of death. Show results and you’ll see a friendly map of Baltimore – the same map you see when you google directions from the Inner Harbor to Charles Village – but this time it has little blue, green, red, black and white pins scattered across it, one for each murder.
= Asphyxiation
= Blunt Force
= Shooting
= Stabbing
= Unknown
It’s like the pins are colorful little dead bodies sprinkled across the land. Nice. And, it’s highlighted in the local newspaper, so you can check in regularly and keep score till New Year’s.
Oh… I just checked. The Chicago Tribune also has a google-powered crime map. I found that Chicago has had 52 murders so far in 2009, compared with Baltimore’s 51. Chicago has more residents, obviously. Sort of scary that the total number of murders for each city are so close.
http://files.chicagotribune.com/metro/crime/