Nice.

“Trying to draw conclusions from data that is likely ‘dirty’ is often a fools errand. Probably the best you can do, is find interesting trends and then try and get good clean data collected – the whole scientific method thing.”

That’s a great point. It has to be an iterative process. You get hold of some data, you make some general observations, you discover the limitations that prevent more useful observations, and you (hopefully) create incentive to collect more/better data for another turn of the crank.

It’s not just Excel. Seems like the Lotus Notes folks are playing fun games with graphs where graphs aren’t supposed to exist:
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/gantt-charts-in-lotus-notes?opendocument&comments

If there is any value to the web, it’s that these kinds of clever thinking are published and shared – my entire approach to development in Notes has been turned on its head in the last 6 months because of sites like Interface Matters and Escape Velocity (both referenced in the link above).

Re your data analysis. You’re running into something pretty common when trying to use data post-hoc. If you get a big pile-o-data and don’t know everything about how the data was collected, it can be pretty close to impossible to do anything other than make very general observations. Trying to draw conclusions from data that is likely ‘dirty’ is often a fools errand. Probably the best you can do, is find interesting trends and then try and get good clean data collected – the whole scientific method thing.

Cool stuff and very glad to see you A) getting the data from the police and B) taking the time to hack it.