Crime data restored to Montgomery County open data website + Bethesda crime update

After illegally removing both archived and ongoing crime incident data from the Data Montgomery website on July 19, Montgomery County has restored them as of this morning. The unprecedented 40-day blackout of crime information was a violation of the County's open data law. By comparison, when the County's poorly-thought-out open data law led to residents' email addresses being posted on the internet, the County Council illegally removed the dataset, but later had to revise the law to make such removals legal.

"How would you like 

it if I judged your career 

by those seven minutes 

when you walked off 

the set in New York?''

The data scrub not only reduced public safety and awareness of neighborhood crime trends, but was yet another fiasco for County Councilmember Hans Riemer, the self-proclaimed data guru and Council "Lead for Digital Government." If Dan Rather was remembered for his seven-minute walk-off on the CBS Evening News, what will voters make of the forty days that Riemer spent twiddling his thumbs doing nothing, while critical public safety data remained offline?

In addition, the dataset is now far more unwieldy to use, scrolling far horizontally. Location information is now far less useful - not only is it nowhere near the crime-type column, but it currently is showing no block number. That makes it impossible to zero in on a crime hot spot, particularly on a major road. Crime types are now less clear, rather than more precise - another big step backwards for Riemer and MoCo, even as they falsely claim to be leading the nation. Laughable! For example, where it used to be clear that property had been vandalized, there is now a generic "property damage" tag, that could cover any number of scenarios.

In my investigation, I found out that Fairfax County stopped providing crime data around the same time as Montgomery pulled its data offline. Both counties, coincidentally, are experiencing an explosion of gang-related violence, crime and homicides. Were the removal, and now less-useful, less-user-friendly restored data, an attempt by Fairfax and Montgomery to cover-up the gang-related crime spike?

So far, no one I've contacted in MoCo government has been able to provide a credible explanation for the data removal - if they even answered my queries at all. I am still awaiting results of an information request from County Director of Public Information made August 14.

Finally, here is the latest crime report, for August 26:

Theft from vehicle. Aberdeen Road.

Theft. Democracy Boulevard.

Counterfeiting/forgery. Democracy Boulevard.

Property damage. Gainsborough Road.