[ddj] Open data murder tracker in Trinidad and Tobago

Fri Jan 31 18:09:39 UTC 2014

Hello all,

INTRO
I'm on a team working on a open data journalism project called Bullet
Points and I'm hoping you can lend your collective experience/expertise to
the project.

Bullet Points tracks murders in Trinidad and Tobago. The murders are
tracked on a Google doc here: http://tinyurl.com/bulletpoints2014

The fatal incidents are listed chronologically and are numbered by victim
(murder toll). The victims are announced on Twitter (
twitter.com/bulletpoints_) by their toll number. This system has some
serious limitations.

PROBLEM
Firstly, it is geared toward tracking the murder victims but is an
inadequate way of tracking the actual killings themselves. For example,
when there is a double murder, the toll goes up by two but the number of
incidents goes up by only one.

Secondly, killings do not always occur in the same chronological order that
the victims' bodies are discovered. Sometimes bodies of murder victims are
discovered after several days. When this happens, the relevant killing must
be inserted somewhere in the middle of the existing chronological list,
which obviously changes the toll count of all subsequent victims.
Unfortunately, because our current system relies on the toll count to
identify the victim, it has now run into this serious limitation.

PROPOSED SOLUTION
I think that what I need to do is add another column that contains a unique
reference number for each incident. The unique reference number can follow
a standard protocol such as [DATE][INTEGER]. For example, the most recent
murder, which was discovered today, would have a reference number
2014013001. I think this will deal with the problem but I am not sure it is
the best solution.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you think you can help, I would
be grateful for your perspective on this problem and proposed solution.

-- 
---
Gerard Best
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