Baltimore Arrest Data
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| Over 300 arrests in Baltimore April 1-April 7, 2015 |
Between April 1, 2015 and April 7, 2015 (one week) there were more than 300 arrests. Check out the screenshot. The SpotCrime map is set up to only show the most recent 300 incidents, so this is not a picture of all arrests in that time span, just the most recent 300 of them. That’s about 52 arrests a day in a city whose population is about 622,000.
There has been a lot of talk about what Baltimore arrest data can tell us. Some are suggesting the arrest rates are a direct result of police tyranny. Some blame politicians cooking the books. Some blame the War on Drugs.
What does SpotCrime think? We take the same stance we’ve always had. Open up local data - arrest data, crime data, housing data, jobs data, financial data. Make sure it is up-to-date* and easily accessible for anyone to collect, use, and share without restrictions or repercussions.
Control over data needs to be released. When you hinder transparency there is a decay in trust.
*We’d like to note that Baltimore crime data went down in February. We didn’t get a notification that it went down and we weren’t notified when it would be up and running again. The data feed was restored last Sunday. However, even when the data feed is working, it’s only updated weekly with data that is lagging by a week. Meaning when we upload Baltimore data on Sunday April, 26, 2015 the upload only holds data up to Saturday April 18, 2015.
We have no data on what happened this past weekend, except what has been gathered by the media. Police departments need to understand that the timeliness of the data is as important as the openness of the data.
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