SPI#0: What two years gets you


 Posted on August 14th, 2022 –

In the early days of TCL I pictured myself huddled over a keyboard late into the night, pounding out some shocking exposé for my audience as the rain outside my window made the flickering lights of downtown dance, fierce lightning illuminating the skyline’s silhouette during the particularly hard-hitting sections. With persistence I would become a gritty urban citizen journalist (coder by day).

And it kinda worked.

I mean, Sarah and me did break the Rob Ford coke story well before it ever made headlines but other than that I mostly just took pictures, ranted, and occasionally covered interesting local events. Turns out that getting good intel is tough.

But then a few weeks ago I remembered that I’ve been quietly tracking certain city services’ dispatch data. On September 7th it’ll be exactly two years since I started. Astute readers may have caught an experiment I was running in the sidebar with this data. ** Spoiler Alert ** I decided to pull the plug on that and use it for this project instead.

There are a few gaps in the timeline because some data feeds went into holding patterns while the associated city services tinkered with their sites. The data is mostly complete but it’s safe to say that in some cases the total numbers will almost certainly be under-reported.

Still, initial search results are surprising, the kind of information I imagined I’d be blogging about back in 2009. At the outset it’s not exactly gumshoe work but I imagine that an intrepid citizen journalist could do something more with it.

If you find the SPI series interesting I encourage you to share anything you find here on your own site, social media, etc. I ask only that you do me a solid and include an attribution (see bottom of the sidebar for details).

Finally, since it may not be obvious the acronym SPI stands for “Sarah Patrick Investigations”. Or “Salt Pepper Info”. Or whatever works for you. I don’t think we need to get too hung up on it.

What's on your mind?