Our crime coverage may have been doing more harm than good: it’s been erratic and spikey, given the sense that there may suddenly be a crime wave on, whereas our reporting has more to do with what we happen to hear about than what’s actually going on.
To help address this, we have, at readers’ request, created a Wallyhood Crime Forum, where people can let neighbors know about the criminal activity they’ve seen. We’ll roll up a summary of that once / week or so as called for. This will allow people who want to stay on top of it to get that news right away, and those people who are more looking to check the pulse of the situation to do so with some healthy sample sizes.
So, from now on, if someone steals something from you, or you see something suspicious, please report it to the Wallyhood Crime Forum. We’ll do our best to push the info up out into the main blog regularly.
Please do report incidents as they come up. We’re going to use the data as it comes in as a test set for building a live map, so we can see when and where different types of crimes are occuring around our nieghborhood. Eventually, this could prove useful in controlling it, who knows?
My Christmas presents and bag of clothes, including wallet and camera were stolen on Thackeray at 7am the day after Christmas while I was loading the car. Seriously, the window of opportunity was maybe 5 minutes. The police basically told me they couldn’t do much. Seriously, the crime and homeless/drunk/drugs is getting out of hand in the neighborhood. The police need to step it up at least somewhat to respond.