Two of hardest things for me to wrap my mind around at the IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp were how to get the data I wanted, and what to do with it. Data analysis is more than taking apart a spreadsheet, or pawing through a database. Data analysis, we learned, is the middle step of a story. You cannot base a story on the data alone, and you cannot get the data unless you have the contacts to get it.
All of this became clear to me when I returned from the March 2005 Boot Camp and was chomping at the bit to find a story to use my newfound skills. I bought the National Inventory of Dams database for my state from IRE and NICAR Database Library and searched through the IRE Web site for anything I could make a story out of, certain I could blow the lid off something in my Northern Kentucky beat, despite being at a weekly newspaper.
Little did I know, the story was right beneath my feet. As part of my regular beat, I regularly wrote up police reports in the small towns covered, transcribing them from paper to my laptop. I began to notice an increasing number of arrests on drug-related charges. Cold Spring, Ky., was an example of this. Cold Spring, a city of just more than 4,000, was named the fastest growing city in Kentucky in 2004.
The four-lane highway U.S. 27 runs through the middle of the city, connecting the eastern half of Northern Kentucky to I-275, the bypass that circles Greater Cincinnati. The city is hardly an urban center, boasting a generally white, upper-middle class population, with home values in the upper-$250,000 range. I was noticing more frequently that regular traffic stops in Cold Spring were turning into drug arrests.
Additionally, shoplifting charges in the four major grocery stores were increasing and, more often than not, the things being stolen could be used in methadone production. I decided to take closer look. I didn't find a smoking gun, but an existing trend that was being investigated by the police. It is evidence of the importance of source relationships. We started by requesting all of the police reports since January 2000.
At first, the request was met with a modicum of disbelief. In short, the department clerk told me I was free to go through all 5,000-plus handwritten reports and take from them whatever information I wanted. But the police chief told us that, since 2003, those records were kept in a database, and he would be willing to give them to us on CD. That data dump took more than an hour, not in processing time, but in negotiation over each data category and whether or not it should be divulged.
The process meant sitting with the chief and discussing each category in depth, sometimes giving in, sometimes citing public record law. There was no charge for the data. Some categories of data were easily determined such as age, offense, date of offense and location of offense. Information about name, address, arresting officer and Social Security number had to be thoroughly discussed to determine how essential the information was to our story, and whether or not it violated anyone's privacy.
In the end, we were able to get everything, except Social Security numbers, in a comma-delimited text file which we imported into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I work in a Mac-based newsroom and Excel was readily available. In addition, I worked with Excel in the corporate world before becoming a reporter and it was easy for me to work with the data that way and turn over a story quickly, instead of relearning the Structured Query Language also covered in Boot Camp.
The result was a detailed report of every arrest or citation in the previous three years that was easily sorted and manipulated for analysis. That analysis started with breaking down information by year. Each year's arrests and citations were then categorized by type of citation. All those not falling into a drug category were eliminated from the table. Then, data was sorted per citation. Each citation was sorted by name of offender.
Offenders were checked against one another to make sure that they were not multiple charges on the same citation. Additionally, citations were sorted according to ZIP code to determine where the biggest number of offenders was coming from. The data proved that most offenders lived in the county, contrary to law enforcement professionals' belief that the majority of the offenders were coming from outside the county.
Data also revealed offenders came more from rural areas of the county, than from the more urban areas. Those arrested were more likely to be mid-20s to mid-30s, instead of college-aged children coming from Cincinnati or nearby Northern Kentucky University as many law enforcement officials previously thought. Because of space considerations, much of that information was not used in the final story. After culling the data down to the essential information, saving each spreadsheet along the way, we were able to track the increase, however slight, over the three years covered in numbers and types of drug arrests and citations.
That is where the story started, not ended. At the same time, our law enforcement sources were telling us that area police officers were looking into the same things we were. As it turned out, police officers in Campbell County, Ky., were working to clamp down on drug use along the same stretch of highway where we had noticed problems. A six-week sweep netted 70 busts for drug possession and use. It was the anecdotal evidence that helped make the story come alive.
Highland Heights Police Chief Carl Mullen, who organized the sweep, said the problem stemmed from users traveling south from Cincinnati, as well as from residents from every municipality in the county. "I was surprised at the number arrested; we all were actually," Mullen said. "We knew it was a problem. But we didn't know how big of a problem it was." Mullen said arrests included pregnant women, social workers, students and even mothers with their children in the car with them.
"It was all walks of life. It's not isolated to any class," he said. "We had one where a girl had told us that she at one point had a $400-a-day habit. When she was approached, she didn't have any drugs on her, but she admitted to us that she had an addiction problem." One officer talked about arresting a woman for shooting up heroin in her car while driving her children to day care. Our examination of the trends showed that while there was a 17 percent increase in the number of arrests made for drug-related offenses in Cold Spring alone, there was a staggering 146 percent increase in arrests made for possession of a controlled substance.
Campbell County police continue to work together, nearly nine months later, on controlling the flow of drugs through the area. In the words of Mullen, what happened over those six weeks is just the tip of the iceberg. "We got 70 people," he said. "How many others do you think are out there?" Contact Liz Carey by e-mail at lcarey@communitypress.com