My Sunday column (linked here) delved into the database of consumer complaints about defective products. It's accompanied by my colleague Jeff Hargarten's interactive database of the 400 public reports made by Minnesotans to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
I didn't have to search for the data, because the commission has a link to its entire public report database right on its saferproducts.gov search page. It's the kind of data access that all government agencies should provide, because it encourages the data geeks out there to do their own crunching and offer the government some insights that they could not reach on their own.
When you download the database, it doesn't come with the photos that consumers sometimes send in to back up their stories. You can find those by using the saferproducts.gov search engine. Some of them are quite alarming, such as the Brooklyn Park oven explosion earlier this month that I mentioned in my story (right). No one was hurt. The manufacturer chose not to respond.
