This time around The Commercial Appeal tackles violent crime on the neighborhood level. Kristina Goetz examines the Clementine neighborhood, which I identified as having the most violent crimes July 2000-May 2009, and 39 other neighborhoods which account for 10 percent of the violent crime in Memphis. Read the story here and don’t miss the rest [...]

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This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so stupid: Wired reports that Web geek Aaron Swartz runs a PERL script to scrape all of the federal court documents off of PACER’s normally pay-as-you-go system and incurs an FBI investigation as a result. Documents generally cost 8 cents apiece, but the Government Printing Office was experimenting with allowing [...]

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Part 1 of the Commercial Appeal’s True Crime series has been published at last. A lot of work went into the project and the result is many different components. You can head directly to the project page, or if there’s too much to wrap your head around you can use this handy road map instead. [...]

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The Commercial Appeal launches the first of its five-piece series on crime in Memphis on Sunday. There’ll be about one new installment every few weeks through the end of the year. Editor Chris Peck wrote a promo for the website. He explains a little bit about what we did, how we did it and, importantly, [...]

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The Commercial Appeal just won an APME First Amendment Citation for its searchable database of handgun carry permit holders who live in Tennessee and stories about the felons with guns and other folks with violent histories who nonetheless obtained permits. A colleague (who left the newspaper a few months ago) posted the original data on [...]

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