Reported by Angela An

10TV has unleashed a powerful new tool in the fight against crime; Crime Tracker 10.

It's a brand new initiative to help you learn about crime in your community. 10TV is going more in-depth than ever before, focusing on the "patterns" that help police understand why certain crimes happen in certain places.

Crime Tracker 10 will show you trends to help you learn what kind of crimes are on the rise and focus on locations, pinpointing the central Ohio neighborhoods being targeted.

Starting with Columbus homicides, there were 40 as of this weekend (click here of a map of homicides in 2006). Who's doing the killing and why?

Northeast Columbus was the scene of the city's latest murder, number 40. That's seven more than what police saw this time last year (for a breakdown of the murders in Columbus for both 2005 and 2006, click here).
 
"The majority of our victims and assailants I would say are unemployed, they live off the street, they make their life off the street and they die on the street," says Homicide Detective Pat Dorn.
 
Detective Dorn says in most cases, there is a connection between the victims and their attackers.

Crime Tracker 10 took a closer look at the numbers and found seven of those cases involved drugs, two dealt with domestic violence and two others were accidental shootings.
 
Police say they've identified and charged suspects in half the murders, but there are still 20 others that remain unsolved.
 
Det. Dorn says, "They escalate from a verbal altercation to a physical altercation to someone getting a weapon and using it."
 
Police say most murders take place on the west side of Columbus along I-70 (click here for a map of homicides in 2005).

"The Bottoms and the Hilltop, and right behind that is the precinct on the near east side," says Det. Dorn.

With the summer months around the corner, major crimes like murder, rape, robbery and arson continue to rise. The numbers drop when temperatures turn colder.

After 13 years investigating homicides, Det. Dorn says one thing is clear, "The primary motive is robbery and drugs or a combination of the two. Those constants stay the same."