Similar to the Dakota County Criminal Complaints map I created earlier this year, this is a dynamic and graphical representation of the data available via the Dakota County Inmate Search. I was inspired by the site Tampa Bay Mug Shots and decided to create a similar version for those of us in Dakota County on the cheap (i.e. free).
BUYER BEWARE: the data used to generate this report is fluid in nature and I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the reporting that lies below. That said, this data is updated regularly and the charts are updated along with it. Please feel free to check back as often as you like and I’d love to hear suggestions on charts you’d like to see added:
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Related posts:
Dakota Complaints Map
Dakota Inmate Dashboard
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November 23rd, 2009 at 7:08 am
Note:
1. This data began with 295 inmates and has been growing daily since 11/16. Once I have 60 to 90 days worth of data, I will begin dropping off older listings from the dataset.
2. The charts all encompass this cumulative data. Some fields do not get populated by Dakota County (especially on new bookings) so some of the charts are not 100% representations of the currently incarcerated inmates. Data is updated several times throughout the day and gaps are filled in then.
3. The age scatter plot shows *all* ages currently incarcerated over time (x axis = time)
4. I am only showing the cities we mainly cover here in the “Arresting City” bar chart. Savage is not included because they are Scott County.
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:03 am
Dynamic Dakota County Inmate Data Dashboard: http://tinyurl.com/yeb95y3
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:18 am
Just found out that the Google Chart widgets don’t load in Google Reader. Awesome. Now everyone’s going to go WTF is this bullshit?
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:33 am
Charts don’t load in Google Reader :( RT @SouthMetroNews Dynamic Dakota County Inmate Data Dashboard: http://bit.ly/5lsSmj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 am
Yeah, I was pretty confused at first. But I took the really difficult extra step of actually clicking on the link directly to the post. It was tough, but I made it…
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
Great post. Lots of good data here. The Gender disparity is alarming! Inmate Prom is going to be a little bit awkward.
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:41 am
Great post Bill! It has me thinking: why the peak number of arrests on Thursdays? What’s going on that it would flare up? (I would have thought it would be Saturday and Sunday mornings.)
Is there a way to find out/chart where the respective crime took place? For example, a Burnsville officer makes an arrest based on an outstanding warrant in, say, Eagan. I would assume the arrest would be on the Burnsville portion of the bar chart, but the originating “crime” would be in Eagan. Correspondingly, Eagan P.D. may bring someone in on a Burnsville warrant. Is there a way to do a side-by-side bar chart to compare that? I just don’t want Burnsville to say their crime numbers are “up” because they are picking up bad guys (and gals) from other cities, when it may also be that those “other cities” numbers are “up” because they are picking up Burnsville’s bad guys.
Thanks for putting this together.
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
Whit,
While I am labeling it “Inmates by Arresting City”, I am actually using the “Arresting Agency” field to calculate the numbers. By looking at the data it appeared that someone could be arrested (on a warrant for example) in another part of the state (Stearns County say) on behalf of Burnsville and booked into Dakota County jail. While Stearns County did the actual arrest, the crime was committed in Burnsville (in this particular case) and thus I felt that Burnsville should get credit.
I could compare the number of “Arresting Agency” to the number of “Arresting City” where the city is in one of the several we are mainly interested in (AV, BV, LV, etc). Is that what you meant?
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
Bill – I think your current methodology answers my question then. The Inmates By Arresting City bar chart then does reflect crime stats “in” that city as well.
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
Good deal :-)
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 pm
And if you want to know how bad some of the folks in the pictures are you can check their court records here:
http://pa.courts.state.mn.us/default.aspx
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Excellent work Bill this information is awesome to see nearly realtime. Looking at the current pictures of inmates, why do all of the four white males appear in white T shirts and the minorities are all in colored maroon shirts?
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
BTW, I chose not to link back to the individual inmate pages on Dakota County’s website to save them the traffic hit.
Thanks for providing another way to get at that information Mikeh.
I do have some future plans to link to their Dakota County Criminal complaint (if I can) but we’ll see how that goes.
November 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
As of the latest update the trend of inmates to have their mugshot taken while wearing a white shirt continues.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I believe, and if you go to the page this info comes from you can check multiple people that are in custody, that the color of the shirt comes from the individual choices. Likely their original clothes are confiscated so they get to pick from a small selection to make them feel some comfort.
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Why Thursday arrest peak? Pay day?
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 pm
In college it was always Thirsty Thursday. I’m not sure why that trend would continue in the suburbs though.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
That data is pretty interesting. Lots of dudes from the ages of 20-30 fucking up their lives. Also, as we pretty much all knew, Burnsville is a shit hole.
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Bill is an A+ finder! I had no idea this type of stuff was online. Cant. Stop. clicking.
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Fantastic work Bill!
November 24th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Some real fucking doozies in this morning’s update of the Dakota County Inmate Dashboard: http://tinyurl.com/yeb95y3 (Mr. Moody is my fav).
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
November 24th, 2009 at 8:42 am
RT @SouthMetroNews: Some real fucking doozies in the Dakota County Inmate Dashboard: http://tinyurl.com/yeb95y3 (Mr. Moody is my fav).
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
November 24th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
great work bill. i have been checking in regularly.
November 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Taylor Kaye Zander’s mug shot makes a great argument for adding a third, “Not Quite Sure” category to the “Gender” pie chart.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
If Lita Ford and Amy Winehouse could have a love child, Taylor Kaye would be it.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
A fun game for this. Find the Myspace or Facebook site for these folks.
November 27th, 2009 at 9:04 am
So much for thinking Thursdays were high crime days, I think the other days got jealous and said, I can top that.
November 27th, 2009 at 9:13 am
It should be beginning to even out now. I would give it another week or two and see if the trends continue.
Once we get to 60 days I’ll start limiting by date to keep it at a 60 (maybe 90, I haven’t decided) moving window.
November 29th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
It’s too bad there isn’t a facial hair data category the dashboard can draw from, because I would love to see that percentage. Not to mention the subset of men with facial hair who also have shaved heads, since that seems pretty high too. :)
November 30th, 2009 at 10:48 am
That would be interesting. I’d love to have some sort of image recognition software that could possibly detect it in the mugshots that come through but that wouldn’t give us all the hair that’s out there unfortunately.
I have been watching for duplicates (repeat offenders) and I hope to be able to track them as we begin to approach 60-90 days. There has only been one (based on name/DOB match) so far but it would be cool to calculate days between arrests, show the M to F ratio of repeats, and show number of repeat offenders by city.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Four straight chicks appear on the Dynamic Dakota County Inmate Dashboard today: http://bit.ly/5lsSmj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Their inmate search site is down and thus why there are no current pictures. It’ll refresh again soon after their site comes back up.
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:55 am
All is well again.
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 am
One thing I have learned from all of this…. pretty people don’t get arrested.
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:43 pm
@rit it’s all working. Trying to pass HTML in the cells & it didn’t like that. Been using it for 14 days w/this: http://tinyurl.com/yeb95y3
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
December 9th, 2009 at 7:35 am
[...] County Criminal Complaints Archive on my site daily. Also don’t forget to keep checking the Dakota County Inmate Dashboard throughout the day to keep up to date on the latest idiots incarcerated and their glamour shots! [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Macy Gray doppelganger on the Dakota County Inmate Dashboard today: http://bit.ly/5lsSmj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
December 14th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I fixed the issue where someone who did not have an ethnicity was screwing up the dashboard.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I have no idea why this one particular person continues to appear without an ethnicity. Ugh. I’ll get around to fixing it permanently eventually.
December 16th, 2009 at 12:07 am
I’m just wondering why South St. Paul, West St. Paul, and Inver Grove Heights aren’t included as cities in Dakota County?
December 16th, 2009 at 5:24 am
They’re included in the overall picture but when it came to narrowing down some of the charts I only chose cities that I typically cover (see the category list on the right hand side of the page). If you’d like to see stats on the other Dakota County cities let me know and I’ll be happy to run some queries against the data and display them here.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Interesting site. I like to show these pictures to my teenage daughter and pre-teen son to show them that if they become a criminal, they’ll get very ugly.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:25 am
Bill: Is there any way to track the number of repeat offenders on the dashboard, say, # of inmates incarcerated >1x over the past 180 days?
December 21st, 2009 at 8:45 am
Whit,
As I stated above, I have been looking for repeat offenders but the N is surprisingly low at this point (I expected it to be much higher honestly) so I haven’t bothered to put up a chart with that data. Perhaps as I continue compiling the data we’ll see more repeaters but until then it’s not worth it.
As of today (and I have 859 records total) there are 3 repeats (0.35%).
December 21st, 2009 at 12:52 pm
HA! That made me laugh right out loud! So the next question would be does getting arrested make you ugly? Or do they only bother to arrest the uglies and the not ugly people just get a warning?
December 21st, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Consider this. If you are being arrested, picture taken, and printed, my guess is that folks are not at their peak of chipperness. Unless they are drunk that is. Second point would be that the more elegant criminals… those that take care of their appearance, likely are also taking care when committing crime, thus more likely to avoid arrest. Third, police officers tend not to be willing to wait for you to fix your face, when they come knocking on your door to haul you off to the pokey.
December 25th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Oh, that’s why they didn’t make it to the Xmas party. They were drunk already….
December 29th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Well, Elias Rocha seems to be taking things in stride.
December 30th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I wonder if they’re going to go Biblical on Beth Jo’s ass?
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:07 am
Due to a change made in 2010 by Dakota County I had to update the code which pulls the most recent inmates. I have made the changes and all is well again.
January 3rd, 2010 at 12:13 pm
They all seem nice, invite them to the next gathering!
January 6th, 2010 at 9:35 am
When I did the manual update for 2010 I didn’t set it back to automatic so we were w/o any new inmates since 1/4 at 8 AM. Sorry about that. The script is catching back up and we should have everything shortly. I suck.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:00 am
i didn’t see timothy edward carson’s pic?
bb
January 8th, 2010 at 9:05 am
He was up yesterday. He’s already been pushed off by the new people.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:30 am
sad story!
bb
January 10th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Nope, it’s not a bug on my side people, two of those booked into Dakota County jail last night are either identical twins separated at birth or Dakota County’s system got a little jumbled last night:
http://services.co.dakota.mn.us/InmateSearch/Details.aspx?PIN=1000215
http://services.co.dakota.mn.us/InmateSearch/Details.aspx?PIN=1000219
January 10th, 2010 at 8:54 am
I think it is more that the inmate was ‘confused’ over his name and date of birth.
The second link indicates: “Charge: Drivers’ Licenses – Use False Name/DOB To Identify Self to Police – GM”
January 11th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Mrs. Marcos – Yah, that is a good one. What an oddity that the two men would be jailed on the same night! HAH
Kinda scares me when the police have data integrity issues. I’ll remember not to get pulled over in DC for fear of being mixed up with this guy:
http://services.co.dakota.mn.us/InmateSearch/Details.aspx?PIN=1000210
January 11th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I wouldn’t say it’s a data integrity issue. The dude used a fake name and then they fixed it.
January 11th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
It may also be an issue of having a photo of the guy under both names in the system if he is known to use an alias, so that if he uses the alias in the future, both records come up.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:31 am
[...] I mentioned back at the end of November, I planned to look at the data which powers the Dakota County Inmate Dashboard and do an analysis [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
I’m working on something fairly similar for Scott County’s inmate register. While it won’t have all the same data due to differences in what they offer and how it’s displayed, I can still do age ranges, gender, and offer their mugshots. I have the data on what they were charged with but I will have to look into how this is recorded and what it means and with that I can do avg bail, arresting agency, etc. We’ll see how it goes.
But a quick analysis shows that their current inmate population (as of today) looks like:
* N = 94 (F:9, M:85)
January 14th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Interesting to see that their 30 to 34 year olds are more likely to get arrested whereas it’s the 20-24 year olds in Dakota. The median age (as of 2008) of Scott County is a year younger than Dakota. Any thoughts on why this would occur?
January 14th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Longer history of crime in the area would be my guess. Could also be something related to sentencing or the types of crimes. I.e. what crime are 30 to 34 year old folks arrested for most often vs 20-24? Statistics… don’t ya love them.
Are you constructing a data warehouse of sorts to log all of this, or do you just parse ascii or xml files?
January 14th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
I do both.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:14 am
I like how Burnsville has the highest amount of inmates. Kudos mayor Kautz for your tough stance on crime.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:23 am
It is odd that while Burnsville has almost the same number of residents as Eagan (just 4,000 residents less as of the 2000 census), it has a pretty disproportionately high number of arrests compared with Eagan. I thought income level may be a factor given that generally, the higher the median income is, the more affluent a community is and therefore the less crime there would be. However, Burnsville’s median income is higher than Eagan’s, so that theory goes out the window too. The only other conclusions I can come up with would be Burnsville’s location at the 35E/35W connection making it a great location for drug transportation (not likely to skew the numbers that much, particularly since Eagan is close too) or the closer proximity to Bloomington, Minneapolis, etc. (again, I have trouble believing the numbers would be skewed that much). If none of those theories were to hold true, then I guess you’d have to look at the law enforcement in each city.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
How does one qualify to get to be a Dakota County inmate? I had to get someone out of the Lakeville PD this week after a DUI arrest within hours after the incident. All I had to do was sign a paper saying that I wouldn’t let them drive that day. They didn’t even look at my license, smell my breath or really even look at me much. I thought that was pretty strange. Of course, it was 12:30 in the afternoon……This was their first offense, maybe a repeat offender would qualify for a night in the Dakota County jail. I think an overnight stay for all DUI offenders would be a good thing.
January 15th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Regarding the older ages of offenders in Scott County — this is a shot in the dark that might be totally off, but maybe it has to do with the presence of Mystic Lake and Canterbury? I don’t think a whole lot of younger people go to either of those. I know that the two times I’ve been to Canterbury for a charity fundraiser, I was the second-youngest person there (the youngest being my wife) so far as I could tell. Valleyfair would skew it younger again, of course, but it’s closed right now.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Scott County provides offenders’ addresses in the register so it is possible for me to see where they come from. That way we’ll be able to tell where they are from. I’ll probably strip the zip codes out and do it that way. Would be interesting IMO.
January 16th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Update on Scott County for those of you interested:
I have completed the scripts to pull the data and inmate images. It also does some fancy dancy stuff to crop the side view out (only want the face front version like Dakota) and add the name tag at the bottom.
Todo:
1. Contact Scott County to see what their charges list means.
2. Determine how to parse the mess of charges information to provide similar data to Dakota. I really don’t think they’ll be comparable on a lot of things due to the way they deal with the arresting agency, etc. Boo.
3. Finish automation and get the post up.
Fun times!
January 29th, 2010 at 11:46 am
I have updated the code to limit the reporting dataset by date. I chose a seemingly arbitrary amount of 68 days of data because it’s about 6,000,000 seconds. Don’t ask. If you’re a nerd you’ll probably understand why I did it that way.
So every time it updates it’ll do this for us for what’s shown above but I will keep all the data elsewhere for fun.
March 25th, 2010 at 7:32 am
[...] queried the Dakota County Inmate data I have and found that there were 42 African-Americans, 3 Asians, and 9 Indigenous (and who knows [...]
May 4th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
I seemed to have completely fixed the data so that it’s only displaying the 68 days of data no matter if it’s running a full pull or an intermediate update.
While I still have all of the records for my own reporting purposes, I am only displaying about 1070 records on the dashboard on any given day. There are nearly 2900 records currently over history.
Interesting comparison is the Scott County Inmate Dashboard dataset which is currently not date limited and only has 1062. I guess I need to start date limiting that one here soon. Ugh.
May 24th, 2010 at 10:31 am
Had to make a minor change to the code to get the inmate images to get pulled. All is well in the world again.
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:09 am
Google has broken the dashboard widgets. Ugh.
July 30th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Google has fixed the issues but I have to recreate all the dashboard widgets to get them working again. The dashboards should be fully operational by the end of the weekend.
July 30th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
[...] to the Dynamic Dakota County Inmate Data Dashboard I created recently, this is a dynamic and graphical representation of the data available via the [...]
August 2nd, 2010 at 9:03 pm
The charts are back up and running. Sorry about the downtime but Google made it a bit of a bitch to get back up and running.
April 8th, 2011 at 10:26 am
[...] Inmate Data in the Data Integration section. The paper was based on the work I’ve done with Dakota and Scott inmate dashboards as well as the Level-3 Sex Offenders and the analysis I’ve done, and [...]
April 8th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
[...] by automatically crawling the Dakota County site about once every four hours and auto-updating all charts and graphs. Not All Peachy There are pitfalls to scraping for your data rather than gathering it directly [...]
January 10th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
I have deleted two comments that were approved here. One was a spammer that beat my newest “Spam Queue Fix” code by using the e-mail address of an approved reader. The other was lefty asking WTF.
I have fixed the code so that it appears to fix the issue with the spammers.
January 10th, 2012 at 8:51 pm
As long as you count my post. :)