For Fans of The Wire (and the morbidly curious)

I was fascinated to learn that the real Baltimore Sun has an interactive page/Google Maps application that shows the location of murders, and allows you to filter by age, race, gender, cause of death, and whether or not there was an article about the murder. (It also allows you to filter by district which is helpful for fans of The Wire who don’t know Baltimore at the street level.)

When I first popped over to look at the annual results, I was surprised by how few murders there had been, relatively speaking. I mean, going by The Wire I expected a lot more.

Then I realized that it was the first week of February and I was looking at “all murders in 2008 so far“, or just 5 weeks.

When I flipped the settings to see the results for all of 2007…

…well, that was more like what I expected.