What's going on in Sunnyvale?
The big news on local TV today is the "59% rise in violent crime" in Sunnyvale. That caught my attention, because a) it sounds like another bogus use of statistics and b) as we've seen in Los Altos next door, crime has been generally low and not shooting up. The news report alluded to "California DOJ" data, but failed to actually point to it. Have no fear, gentle reader, for we have trod where KTVU fears to go: straight to the data. The DOJ does, in fact, provide this data, although it takes a little work to get to. You can download it here, if you are interested: https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics Next you have to filter that down to only show Sunnyvale. Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice all have a way of doing that, using "filters." Once you set them up, you get a little pull-down menu for each column, and you can select only the values you want. That's what I did, for each of the 5 cities shown below. Then I plott...