Matt Stiles // The Daily Viz

HomicideWatch D.C. charted 2011 homicides late last month. This is a great batch of data, all hand collected by Laura and Chris Amico. 

The Los Angeles Times has released a nifty interactive map and table of the recent arson fires in the City of Angels: 

Since the morn­ing of Dec. 30, a wave of in­ten­tion­al blazes has dam­aged prop­erty and left res­id­ents on edge. The fires range from the West­side to Hol­ly­wood and from the San Fernando Val­ley south to Len­nox. Nine more fires were re­por­ted Monday morn­ing. Of­fi­cials have not con­firmed wheth­er some re­por­ted fires are re­lated to the ar­son spree. The Times will up­date this map as more de­tails be­come avail­able.

I like how the fires are categorized by type — and that the Times’ data desk added a handy timeline to help readers visualize when the fires were set: 

The FBI today released its mid-year crime figures from large cities around the county, and the data are positive, NPR reports: 

The number of violent crimes reported by 12,500 U.S. law enforcement agencies fell 6.4 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same time in 2010, the FBI reports.

Using the federal data, which covers Jan. to June of this year, I plotted the figures on maps using proportional symbols. This first map shows the violent crime rate (bubble size increases with higher rates) by city.

While large cities like New York, Houston and Los Angeles have more violent crimes, visualizing the rate shows us cities in which residents are more likely to be victims. The rate in St. Louis, Mo., tops all cities with more than 100,000 residents. (The top 10 are labeled on the map). 

The second map plots the murder rate, with New Orleans leading all U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents. (The top 10 are labeled on the map). 

Larger versions: Violent crime | Murder

The Washington, D.C., official data catalog is a rich source for information about the nation’s capitol. Users can download dozens of free GIS products as well as datasets related to city functions (311 service requests, permits, etc.) in relatively clean tables.

For today’s visualization I downloaded some 31,000 serious crime incidents in 2010, and then uploaded them to Google Fusion Tables, a free online database manager with powerful querying and visualization tools. The data were already geocoded, so I filtered the table for homicides and made this simple map (click the photo to see a full-screen interactive version): 

View an interactive map with all crimes, not just homicides. 

Sources: D.C. Data Catalog, Google Fusion Tables | Raw Data: CSV