Via Balt Tech blogger Gus Sentementes:

Big news today out of Baltimore: the long-anticipated (by this blog) release of data sets by the city has finally arrived.

There’s crime data, 311 data, tax data, parking citation data — and much, much more. The data is available at this site: http://data.baltimorecity.gov/

What’s cool about this new site is that it doesn’t only allow you to view the data. Programmers and hackers and web geeks can export the data and come up with their own presentation methods for displaying the data.

There’s several sets and subsets of crime data over several pages. Paul Smith, co-founder of EveryBlock, uploaded the overall crime data – which covers the time period of Jan. 1 to Nov. 30 – in a sortable Google map found here.

There’s much to dissect.

I’m already astonished to see the amount of data points for certain types of crimes, though over the course of an entire year it’s not really all that surprising – we’ve just never seen it like this. The Police Department’s archaic crime mapping program, which allowed you to search 14 days at a time going back 90 days – was incredibly frustrating to use and ultimately ignored by the public. Equally surprising are some of the areas that show no crime at all. We’ll be analyzing the data in the days to come, but post comments about interesting trends you are seeing.

Here’s one quirk Paul already found: At least 170 crimes – including at least one shooting that is supposed to display in Perkins Homes – show up for a seemingly random data point in West Virginia. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program is located in Charleston, W Va., but that’s not where this point is showing up. I’m seeking clarification from the city.

Baltimore Crime Beat