Predicting and Plotting Crime in Seattle

https://racketracer.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/predicting-and-plotting-crime-in-seattle/

by racketracer • 11 years ago

35 9 11 years ago

racketracer.wordpress.com

seanhandley• 11 years ago

"Plotting crime" - great word choice :D

racketracer2• 11 years ago

Pun completely intended

danbruc• 11 years ago

The maps lack normalization by population density. But even that might be misleading, for example industrial areas having low population densities but nonetheless a lot of people in the area during working hours. And while population density might be relevant for some crimes it might be irrelevant for others. Where not to park your car is probably better normalized by the number of parking spaces or even the number of cars present. So don't try to read to much out of maps or charts not specifically crafted to answer the question you are interested in.

gus_massa• 11 years ago

I agree, but they are nice visualizations nevertheless. Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1138/

I don't know Seatle, but it looks like the major highways / avenues are highlighted in these crime maps, perhaps they don't have too much population or parking lots but they have a lot of traffic. (I don't know Seatle, perhaps they do have a lot of population and parking lots.)

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

All of the highlighted streets have a lot of businesses with a lot of parking and a lot of traffic through the area.

squidfood• 11 years ago

The hotspots north of the band of water (canals) are definitely lower-income concentration areas; a couple of them highways with seedy hotels (prostitution/drugs).

The main blob is "city center". Some low income areas in there don't look very visible at this scale, but also "where everyone is out on streets" (work in daytime, nightlife at night).

peatmoss• 11 years ago

This is super tricky. One project I worked on looked at pedestrian deaths at a regional scale. We were lucky that the regional government had daytime population estimates for the CBD. Otherwise downtowns tend to look like pedestrian killing fields. Even with those daytime estimates, you're stuck treating those areas as "special," and thus limiting yourself in terms of the kinds of comparisons you can defensibly make.

You don't always need to supply a rate to get a useful visualization either. In the case of pedestrian fatalities, you might still want to invest heavily in safety improvements where absolute numbers of fatalities are high, but rates are low.

On the visualization side, I've found that maps are not always the best strategy for spatial data.

marcodena• 11 years ago

I think you should better read works like this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2983

Predicting and Plotting Crime in Seattle

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