Crime across time: date and time in crime data feeds
Date and time is important when displaying crime data publicly for obvious reasons - the public needs to know when a crime occurred to better inform themselves. Additionally, date and time is important for any type of crime analysis over time. There are dozens of different ways to display a date and time. Every police agency addresses this differently in their crime data feeds. For example, some agencies include date and time in the same data fields, others break them apart into separate fields. Some include time, some don’t. Some write out the month, others use numbers. Some make note of the time zone, others use Unix time. Representing time is sometimes a minor headache, but not a necessarily difficult task. The SpotCrime Open Crime data Standard (SOCS) specifically addresses the date/time issue in open crime data by specifying that date and time to be split into two different data fields. The ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD standard is to be used for date and the UTC and 24 hour to be used for