Let our powers combine: Philly Rap Sheet and Philly Crime Map team up

The news for today: My two Philadelphia crime sites, Philly Rap Sheet and Philly Crime Map, are joining together in a way that enriches both and will make Philly Crime Map considerably more powerful in the near future.

From an e-mail I sent to select users:

Wanted to let you know that I've begun the process of linking together Philly Rap Sheet's arrest data and Philly Crime Map's location information, greatly enriching the police department's Part One Crime Incidents dump.

The result: You can now see who was arrested when you look up new incidents on Philly Crime Map, and certain entries on Philly Rap Sheet are now geotagged (example here).

What is now a simple linkage will soon grow, enabling users to search by demographic on Philly Crime Map as you're currently able to do on Rap Sheet. I'm hoping within the next month that you'll be able to see the geographic distribution of crimes committed by 21-year-olds, or the arrests by a certain officer at night, or the string of crimes committed by a single person over two years.

I'm also working to speed up Philly Crime Map's searches, which have gotten a bit creaky with the half-million crime incidents it currently catalogs.

Say hello to Philly Crime Map

I've just launched Philly Crime Map, a new site tracking crime block-by-block in Philadelphia.

Powered by the Philadelphia Police Department's new Part One Crime Incidents data dump, the site breaks down the overwhelming wealth of policing statistics down to the local level, showing trends from across the street or across the city.

Joining the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

My own blog is late to the party, but I'm happy to write that July 9 was my first day at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where I've joined their "Pipeline" project and will be focusing on computer-assisted reporting and news app development.

Pipeline covers Marcellus shale and natural gas development in Pennsylvania and beyond, a fast-growing industry that will likely only grow more prominent as the search for domestic alternative energy sources intensifies. It's a great operation that's already won accolades from Scripps Howard and ONA.

It's a chance for me to take my reporting in a new direction, exercising coding and database skills on a subject that bears in-depth scrutiny. And I'm pumped to join the Post-Gazette, "one of America's great newspapers" in a city that's become synonymous with post-industrial rebirth.

Of course, you can't change without losing something in the process. I'm sorry to say goodbye to all my friends at The Morning Call and will always be grateful for their friendship and support during my first two years in the professional world. I met people I'll never forget, and I'm excited to see where they head in the future.