Because the data is City-wide and each upload file represents one day in time, in order to find all the data for a given neighborhood, one must download all the daily files and then sift through them looking for street names and block numbers of the neighborhood in question. (The author found that trusting Beat or Reporting Area to capture all the data for a given street is inaccurate.)

The author of this site is a VIP (Volunteers in Patrol) coordinator for his neighborhood and wanted to get a better idea of crime patterns in his own neighborhood. He is also a database designer by trade so was able to put his professional skills to work in designing a personal database with which he could study crime trends in his own neighborhood. As it turned out, the automated mechanism he built was easily expandable to any neighborhood and the word got out and other neighborhoods asked for reports. We are now up to over 190 neighborhoods and 324 apartment complexes, mostly in but not limited to, North Dallas.

The neighborhoods are simply described to the system as a set of streets and associated block number ranges.

Each morning, seven days a week, the author's computer wakes up and downloads the daily file, adds the content of the daily file to the database, then processes all the neighborhoods of interest, one at a time, by selecting those crime incidents which occurred on one of the streets in the neighborhood. If there are any changes from the night before, an e-mail is automatically sent out to the appropriate neighborhood representative. Using this technique, neighborhoods only receive notice of crimes when there are crimes in their specific neighborhood. With any luck, a neighborhood seldom or never gets an e-mail from us. The whole unattended process takes a little over an hour.

The author has received several requests to make all of the nightly neighborhood reports available via the Internet and this web site is our response to that request. Note that we do not really have the bandwidth to send automatic e-mails to every member of every neighborhood (there are over 39,000 homes represented at the present time) but will continue to send e-mails to two or three representatives of each neighborhood.

Note that "neighborhoods" and their names as they appear on this site are defined by the Dallas CWEB organization and the Neighborhood Policing Officer within each division of the Dallas Police Department.