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Duplicate Data Entries Show Some Crime Stats Higher

If you were thinking of moving to a particular neighborhood in Milwaukee, you’d likely want to know a number of things: how is public transportation, say, and are there parks and libraries nearby? But perhaps most important would be the crime rates – what are they and are they going down, or up?

The Milwaukee Police Department maintains a public website for just such searches, but it turns out their data contained many duplicate records – which would obviously skew search results.

Andrea Waxman is a multi-media reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, and she discovered the duplicate records on the MPD’s public website when researching the data for another story. She told Lake Effect’s Bonnie North the story. 

The MPD has since corrected the data.

Bonnie North
Bonnie joined WUWM in March 2006 as the Arts Producer of the locally produced weekday magazine program Lake Effect.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, or NNS, is an online source for objective, professional multimedia reporting on issues in 18 central city Milwaukee communities.