I have a suspicion these statistics are only accurate and available when it is convenient for the people responsible for providing those statistics.
Isn't it the case that the police are responsible for providing statistics to the public? During the pandemic and during the George Floyd protests, there were political reasons for gathering information and using to show that A) "crime is up!" or B) "crime is actually still historically low!"
A few years ago, I was frustrated about the reporting on these statistics, and went to a variety of police web sites.
Some of the websites said: "Because of the pandemic, we are so overwhelmed by crime and everything, we cannot provide current statistics!" And, other sites said "Because of the pandemic, we are so overwhelmed by crime and everything, we cannot provide past statistics!" And, some websites just completely won't load. If a police department does not want to pay their IT person, or the company that provides it can't get their act together, the website will be down and you cannot get information directly from the police.
If you have a category of crime that is high, the police need to either fix that problem, or fix the numbers. Right?
I know that some sources of information come from the FBI. But, aren't those numbers often provided by the police?
And, in certain parts of the country were in favor of defunding the police, and certain parts of the country are filled with "Blue Lives Matters" people. Won't the police in the defund areas want to show crime is up? Won't those in regions with different sensibilities want to show their policing works? Can anyone tell me why this isn't a problem?
It is anecdotal, but aren't there areas of certain cities where the citizens have stopped reporting crimes because the police don't come anymore? How is that reflected in the numbers, if at all?
Can anyone else see a big gaping hole in how these stats are collected and used? Is there standardization across the country about these statistics?
I realize it has a very different aim than safemap, but I frequently use it as an example of how the selection of data sources and its visualization is crucial in communicating a particular story. This communication already starts with the name: calling a map of reported crime a 'safemap' implicitly suggests that red colored places are 'unsafe' and should be avoided. (The about popover literally states: "Learn which parts of San Francisco are safest and which parts are best to avoid.") Which, as the discussion here suggests might be more complicated than that.
Currently the UI on the left returns all empty images for me, https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/re068bj1vnaitsoh59x27/NoImage...
I rather enjoy using either points directly (and for dense point maps use leaflet's cluster markers), or actual outlined areas (e.g. using DBSCAN). For a few examples I have put together
- Dallas crime dashboard (using wasm + python), https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/Dallas_Dashboard
- Durham NC hotspots (leaflet), https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/DurhamHotspots
We collect over 1M national and hyper-local news in near real-time. Happy to help with collecting crime info from public news.
I'm happy to help for free; we'll also pay to develop & host information extraction using LLM!
Anyone, feel free to email me [email protected]
Personally, I would prefer that the crimes filter panel automatically hide itself when I click on the map after selecting my filter.
Kudos.
I turned on all the types of crime and a weird set of diagonal darker regions appeared in the avenues. Either this is some weird artifact of the geocoding or there's some really strange magnetic fields or something affecting crime.
- The maps are pretty and scale nicely. The clarity and granularity of text is appreciated.
- The controls are excellent. I might put the copy and help in the same single title/menu panel (without "viewing:" as obvious)
Some other features I found myself wanting:
- Visually bound the map so you can see when it can't be moved in a direction. Think about what to do when the control panel is open and the user is trying to drag the map to see what's under the panel (instead of closing the panel).
- ability to sort data drill-down by number, to look at most prevalent
- using gradients for data starts to break down at low numbers. I wonder if you can start putting dots under some threshold
- time-range delta heat-maps: 2023 car break-ins vs 2022 (where green is improvement, red is worsening, and intensity is size of delta)
- surfacing qualitative aspects of data sources: one or many (only police?); and perhaps user feedback on quality of data
- curate super-categories, e.g., capturing all cocaine-related offenses, or distinguishing the stacked charges (loitering in the area of ...) from the operative ones (dealing), or crimes against (visiting?) strangers vs locals or friends. The data sources have their own arcane categorizing logic, and it's rarely what users actually want.
- color-code user-specified combinations: prostitution + drugs vs either alone
- Most of these relate to the kinds of questions users can answer with the maps, so if you have a (user-contributed?) panel with questions and their associated configuration sets, it would be very powerful and sticky.
- Then it would be nice to apply the same configuration-set to different cities, and perhaps to see some comparison across cities
Some things I wouldn't do:
- All-caps, tm? ok, but...
- I think putting safety under quality of life makes the product a bit less polarizing and hence more popular - which means adding other quality-of-life measures (e.g., zoning (residential/retail/manufacturing), cost/sf for housing, walkability scoring) E.g., it would be interesting to know which retail districts are super-safe.
Great work on this - very slick UX and super quick.
Be cool to expand it to support the UK or maybe develop some open standard for the way data can be reported. I'm sure businesses would pay for a consolidated data api.
Add more countries please
