[melbourne-pug] Project time?

[Anthony Briggs]

Anthony Briggs wrote:
> Lars Yencken wrote:
>> On 5 February 2010 15:39, Leigh Morresi <dgtlmoon at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:dgtlmoon at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     has anyone actually tried to get this "data" ?
>>
>>
>> I looked at data sets released last year in the same spirit, and they 
>> seemed to be mostly summary statistics, a far cry from the raw data 
>> feeds which powered Chicago Crime, which is now EveryBlock 
>> <http://www.everyblock.com/>.
 >
> That was my thought too. I can't see how you would make something 
> compelling with those three example data sets. From the police site:
> 
> "Victoria Police will be updating the crime figures every three months 
> so you can see what is happening in your suburbs and hear directly from 
> your local police Inspector about the work being done by police in your 
> neighbourhood."
> 
> That's not "open access" - that's called "having a web site".

A quick bit of googling around found this page:

http://www.police.vic.gov.au/content.asp?Document_ID=782

Which gives some more meaty stats, like "Offences Recorded by Offence 
Code 10 Financial Years". However, I suspect you'll need to know a bit 
about the law to make sense of it, and the laws do seem to switch around 
a bit. For example, there are several lines for trafficking heroin:

653A	TRAFFICK HEROIN	9719.71.1	
2,378	1,745	651	8	24	9	10	5	1	17		
653J	TRAFFICK LARGE COMM QTY - HEROIN	9719.71	0	0	0	10	0	7	7	2	0	4		
653L	TRAFFICK COMM QTY - HEROIN	9719.71AA	0	0	0	12	10	12	13	5	13	7		
653N	TRAFFICK HEROIN	9719.71AC	0	0	324	917	1,175	919	541	599	442	661		

However, there are a couple of fields for the criminal category/code 
that it references (eg. 653A/9719.71.1 or 653N/9719.71AC), so if there 
was another dataset for what these mean, it could work.

Has anyone else found similar datasets online? It could be that using 
sets other than the mickey mouse ones that you're fed by the competition 
might give you a better chance :)

Anthony