Map of the Week: Our murder map, relaunched

TORONTO STAR FILE

We designed our homicide map in the spring of 2005, and hadn’t really rethought it until recently, though we had been aware for a while that we really should. Making the homicide map the Map of the Week freed up the necessary time.

The big change is that we’re now displaying all homicides in the GTA since January of 2005 on a single map (as commenter David Lomax suggested), which I think gives a much better sense of patterns. We’ve also added regional boundaries. Readers can sort by year, sex or age of victim, and whether a firearm was used, and turn the displayed year on and off. If the map loads slowly, try looking at the years one by one.

2008 homicides are still listed in the right-hand column.

The one thing that still needs to be done is implementing a better way of displaying multiple killings. The solution will involve numbered icons.

Nerd box

At the beginning of 2006, we thought that the API wouldn’t display more than a hundred or so points (which at the time it really didn’t), so we started a 2006 map linked to the 2005 map. We’ve carried on that pattern since, creating a fresh map at the beginning of each year, until eventually there were four.

Once again, the map was created by Web producer Brett Smith, who I’m delighted to say is joining the newsroom on Monday. 

Comments

[Chris]

I have been enjoying your blog, as I have long had an interest in maps and their uses. I thought you'd be interested in this blog I stumbled across recently. http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ He has managed to ferret out some pretty neat and fantastic maps. Hope you enjoy.

[pcain]

Thx.

[Drew]

Are the coordinates between the homicide and marijuana maps consistent enough for comparison? Or more specifically, how are the push-pins geolocated?

[pcain]

The grow houses were from a list that the Toronto police provided in response to an FOI request, which we then geocoded. The homicides are from a list we've been maintaining internally for years.

The main link with the grow houses seems to be low urban density.