Roanoke crime report, Dec. 19 to Jan. 19

There are no more time-honored staples of your daily newspaper than the police blotter and that tiniest of news nuggets, the crime brief.

The most chilling homicides, the most audacious thefts, they make the front pages, but just as heartily consumed by readers are those stripped-down chunks of copy about routine robberies or unremarkable burglaries.

Those things haven't changed since the days of press tags in fedora hatbands.

The way it all gets presented, though, has moved to the most modern of media: the Internet. The old police blotter -- these days crime data -- lives not only on a page in the Virginia section, but also on interactive maps on newspaper Web sites, such as roanoke.com.

We launched our first online crime maps for Roanoke and Roanoke County a little more than a week ago in our online data library, the DataSphere.

These (nerd-word alert!) "mash-ups" aren't so different from their print elders: They tell of lives harmed or disrupted, reveal the seedy side of a community, or, in their lesser moments, satisfy the basest forms of curiosity.

But they speak to you in a different way, too. On a map, you can see plainly just where in the community all of that crime is happening. Maps show patterns and reveal clusters of activity. They spark a pondering of vital personal questions: Is my neighborhood safe?

Look on the map and see.

The DataSphere maps are, for the moment, low-tech renditions of this high-tech medium. They are not searchable, and they lack an archiving system. They will improve, and hopefully soon, but they are valuable in the meantime just the same.

Of course, any crime map is only as good as the data behind it.

Check out similar efforts for Richmond (www.richmondcrime.org), Lynchburg (www.newsadvance.com), and Newport News (www.dailypress.com), and you'll find a greater range of crimes than we offer.

It all comes down to what the local police department supplies, and in those localities, police provide information on a broader spectrum of offenses.

To build our maps, I depend on data from the Roanoke and Roanoke County police on their Web sites. Both, to their credit, regularly post weekly reports of what are defined for federal reporting purposes as Part I crimes. Basically, they are the most serious crimes against people and property, including homicide, robbery, arson and rape -- all things you would want to know about if they happened on your street.

You may have read past stories in this paper about Roanoke's crime report, and the city's decision to remove quadrants from the addresses in the report. Look at the report now and you'll see no N.W., N.E., S.W. or S.E. after any address. Most of the time, this doesn't matter. But some streets, such as numbered streets, appear in more than one quadrant, and others, such as Orange Avenue, cross from one quadrant to another.

So, you're left to wonder: Did that burglary happen near my house on 24th Street Southwest or across town on 24th Street Northwest?

City Manager Darlene Burcham called for the removal of the quadrants because she believes the quadrant names have become stigmatized and burdened with stereotypes. At the same time, she directed that the quadrants be supplied on request to identify locations when necessary.

And the city police have quickly complied with every request I've made.

Still, it's tedious for me, and I'm certain for them, also.

Last week, however, I thought we had a breakthrough. The latest crime report was posted with quadrants on streets that appeared in multiple quadrants.

This seemed like a great solution, a balance reached between the two competing public interests of telling people about crime in their community and striking down stereotypes of large portions of the city. The report gave just enough information to be precise, but didn't reduce the list to a quick confirmation of old stereotypes.

Alas, it turned out that the quadrants were posted by accident. They had been added to the list in anticipation of my request for them and put online by mistake. The city's policy hasn't changed.

So, the information remains less complete than it might be, but it is there for your consumption on the city police Web site, and thanks to that, on our new crime map, and that shouldn't be overlooked.