Friday, I succeeded in obtaining a hard copy of a crime report. It is a report from Oct. 26, which was supposedly the most recent report. Everything is hand-written. When I talked to Edna, she said something about them putting the reports into their filing system, which sounded like it may be on the computer. However, she was still adamant about not e-mailing anything. Perhaps when I go to Whiteville, I will get to the bottom of this mystery.
The report is two pages, as was the last one she sent me. I'm not going to sit here and type out each field that is filled in because that would be a waste of everyone's time. I will say, however, that each of these fields should be included in a database. There is a narrative part at the end, and I don't think it needs to be in the database simply because there just really isn't room. The narrative will be useful in obtaining details that may have been missed on the rest of the report, but the actual narrative will not go into the database.
In the case of this report, nothing about the offender is known except for race and sex. Those fields will still need to be included in any spreadsheet that is made, but for this report (and probably for several others), the information can just be filled in as "N/A" or "unknown" (or, as abbreviated on the report, "unk.")
I can't really say much else about the reports as of now. I really need to get several of them. I hope that happens this week. Also, I need to say that I'm quickly getting lost. I'm not exactly sure how to go about making these reports into an online database. I think I understand the basics of Caspio, but I don't necessarily understand where that fits into the picture. I need help connecting the dots. Am I the only one?
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