A Baltimore city councilman is asking that the Baltimore Police Department join most of its big-city counterparts and begin posting crime data on its web site.
Police currently track all sorts of data, and meet weekly to pore over it at sessions called Comstat. But that data stays in-house or is released at community meetings, and Councilman Brandon Scott said police should post it on their web site.
He did a survey of the 40 biggest police departments in the country, and found 22 of them post data online. He singled out Dallas, which posts data weekly and broken down by police district.
Right now, the police department's web site has a section called "Crime statistics," but it looks like officials got weary of the task: they posted three months worth of data before abandoning the effort. Data can also be mapped using the city's Open Baltimore site.