[andymboyle]

Well, I'm not sure what the point of this was. My team at the Chicago Tribune has been working on visualizing and explaining Chicago crime data for quite some time. Here's one of our biggest projects, which pulls in (I think) the same data Socrata used, as well as our own tracking of shootings, homicides and suburban crime data: http://crime.chicagotribune.com

How we built it: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2013/02/28/the-chicago-c...

More about the suburban crime data: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2014/01/31/displaying-cr...

Hopefully one of my coworkers will join in here who's more knowledgeable than me, but remember crime data, such as what Socrata is displaying, is just a snapshot of crimes that have been reported. It could mean those crimes were just more enforced at that time, or more people decided to report crimes, etc. It is not a crime victimization survey.