Methodology

Each Dashboard was created using publicly available data.
First, a historical dataset from 2015-current was requested from the Harris County District Clerk’s office to include bond outcomes.
In addition to the historical dataset requested, we also download the Daily Criminal Filings and Daily Criminal Dispositions datasets via the Harris County District Clerk’s website to ensure our datasets remain up-to-date.
Pull the datasets to categorize them into the 6 groups we have created on our “dashboards” page.
To create each crime type dashboard:

We load our cleaned and organized data into Tableau to begin our visualization process.
We filter data to look at certain crimes based on year, court, bond amount etc., to created visualizations that are easily digestible for the community.

On a monthly basis we check the crime filings and case dispositions reported to the Harris County District Clerk’s office against those submitted to the Texas DPS Crime Records (typically once on the second week of the month and once on the third week of the month to ensure we have not missed any reports as they are submitted to Texas DPS).

For more information about our methodology please contact Sydney Zuiker at szuiker@crime-stoppers.org