Introduction In late 2017 I did an analysis of crime data in my neighborhood (The Heights) using the online Houston Police Department data. This was so interesting that I foolishly decided to expand the effort to cover the whole city. After all, how hard could it be to go from analyzing one police beat with about 13,000 records, to analyzing 109 beats, with a corresponding increase in volume? This effort is still ongoing in fits and starts today, but I thought it would be useful to start documenting the journey now before the pain fades away.

Introduction I have been struggling with geocoding for about a year now, and have begun to learn far more than I wanted about the ugly details of the tools available for free. In particular I have been using Google and the US Census Bureau for geocoding. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, so I thought it would be appropriate to share what I have learned. I would call Google promiscuous - they will try very hard to return a location to you, even if it is all wrong.

Software Setup Download the software per excellent instructions in the user guide wget -qO - http://weewx.com/keys.html | sudo apt-key add - wget -qO - http://weewx.com/apt/weewx.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/weewx.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install weewx Answer several questions during install: Station Location: The Heights, Houston, Texas Lat/Long: 29.794878, -95.402820 Altitude: 83, foot Station Type: Vantage usb port: /dev/vpro Set up the usb port: sudo touch /dev/vpro sudo gvim /etc/udev/rules.

Personal weather station conversion I have been running wview since June 23, 2012. It has been a reliable workhorse, but it doesn’t appear to be maintained any longer, and it does have a couple of issues. The new, improved open-source product seems to be weewx, so I’m migrating to that one. This is the story of that conversion. Preliminaries I know that my old database has some bad data in it, so the first thing I want to do is figure out where that bad data is, and fix it before I migrate the database.

Houston Crime Statistics A debate began on my neighborhood list. “Crime is increasing in the Heights!”, “Crime is not going up in the Heights!” and so on, back and forth. Then someone noted that all the crime data is on the Houston Police Department website, so someone could just download the data and answer the question. I thought to myself, “I could be that someone”, so I started working on it.