If you live in Seattle, you may know about the Block Party. No, I’m not talking about the Capitol Hill Block Party that required tickets and a willingness to endure cattle-run type crowds jammed into each other.  I’m talking about National Night Out and all the block parties that are sprouting up around town this evening.

National Night Out started in 1984, and according to the NATW website

400 communities in 23 states participated… Nationwide, 2.5 million Americans took part…The 27th Annual National Night Out last August involved 37.0 million people in 15,110 communities from all 50 states, U.S. territories, Canadian cities, and military bases worldwide.

2.5 to 37… quite the jump! Unfortunately the NATW website doesn’t have a record of historical participation, but I’m searching around to find some numbers.  I’m still reading Visualize This and I think it might be fun to try to make my own visualization with the data (when I can find it).  I want to compare neighborhood participation with police crisis in each year.  Did participation go up when there was highly publicized crime in a sleepy neighborhood? What drives people to want to know their neighbors? So it’s two charts; a timeline of notable crime and a graph of participation per year. Time to find some data!