Many thanks to Charles McKenzie, assistant professor of Journalism at the University of Tampa, for letting us know that we really sort of suck.
He didn’t say that. We say it (thank God it’s curable). His words were very kind and constructive and we appreciate his help more than he might know.
McKenzie was good enough to inform us that Who’s in a Hoosegow doesn’t work as well as it should. In other words, it was semi-broken for an indeterminate period of time. The search tool seemed to think that the database didn’t contain names from certain Hillsborough County zip codes when, in fact, we know that it did. We suspect this owed to GIGO.
Bottom line: you may have pulled incomplete information from us but we believe the problem is solved.
Prof. McKenzie also pointed out that arrestees charged with multiple counts in Hillsborough County only come up showing one count. The same is true of Pasco. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to correct that going back to July when we started but we do mean to correct it going forward.
Meantime, we apologize to you the reader/user. We should have made sure all the data was coming through clean before putting it up. Shit happens and this is proof. We deserve to be called out for it and we hope that by doing so ourselves we’ll earn back a bit of the credibility lost.
By the way, McKenzie happens to be the staff adviser to The Minaret, which is the student newspaper at UT. That lineup is ripping the cover off the ball (we see those updates, dude!) covering students under arrest, frats in hot water and more. Whether you’re connected to UT or not, it’s good local coverage worth reading.