Finding Criminal Statistics for Your State and County

Have you ever wondered what the crime statistics are for the state and county where you live? Want to know what time of day or night most home break-ins occur where you live? The answers to these questions are available, assuming you can find the statistics online and access them as a private citizen. My blog today will discuss my efforts at finding these statistics for Baltimore County, my home county.

My quest to find the crime statistics for Baltimore County started with a simple Google search for the Baltimore County Government. Once I accessed the Baltimore County Government homepage, it was easy to find the police department page and links to crime statistics. As I accessed the Baltimore Public Safety Dashboard link that I found at the end of the public relations presentation, I was pleasantly surprised to find this screen:

As I explored this screen, I found it was a fully interactive site built on an Arc-GIS Story Map. It is a good platform for graphically displaying large amounts of data and allowing people to interact with it. The data displayed was for the years 2017 through August of 2020, so it was very recent. I could sort the data by category, date, time of the day, precinct, zip code, and many other variables. The ability to look at the data in a multitude of ways in a fast, interactive manner was terrific. As a resident or small business owner, you could fully understand the crime situation in your area in a few minutes spent on this story map.

I sincerely hope you find the crime statistics for your area and learn as much as I did from your examination of the data. It was beneficial to understand the crime incidents that occur versus my perception from hearing anecdotes and reading the published media. As a result of my study of the data, I have adjusted my home security measures to better account for the prevalent crime incidents in my zip code over the last three and half years.

Please feel free to send me comments or questions regarding this blog post or my previous post, and I will respond as soon as possible. Thank you for checking out my blog!