I found an investigative story last spring before I even moved to Arizona to work as a projects reporter at the Tucson Citizen. The Tucson metro area had the nation's highest crime rate, Sperling's BestPlaces found in a study of FBI data. Department officials blamed the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for providing a distorted picture of crime. Using Microsoft Excel, I crunched the FBI numbers to come up with rankings for violent crime.
The violent crime rate for the Tucson area was 55th out of 280 metro areas. I needed to find out where the violent crime was concentrated. The skills I learned at an IRE and NICAR mapping mini-Boot Camp this year helped me answer those questions. Go to the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology Web site (www.cast.uark.edu), click on 'Starting the Hunt,' and you'll find a list of GIS sites nationwide.
Tucson police provided me with an electronic file of the reports but wouldn't give me exact street addresses. I created a spreadsheet of the crime reports in Excel and then opened the file in ArcView. To find the areas with the greatest number of crimes, I needed to count the reports within smaller geographic areas. I attached the geocoded crime reports to a map of 38 police patrol areas. While I was putting together the map, editors and reporters speculated that the highest violent crime rate would be found on Tucson's south side.
The perception proved to be wrong. The area with the highest violent crime rate was on the other side of town – the north side. The north side had long been the site of the city's red-light district, attracting prostitutes and drug dealers. By placing a map of city neighborhood associations over the crime clusters, I knew who to talk to in each community. The ability to downplay violent crime was diminished after the story was published.
In June, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced a violent crimes task force for the city. A city official said my story was the reason the task force was formed. Despite a budget crunch, the Tucson City Council approved the police department's request for $4 million to hire 71 more officers.