Introduction

In the last decade, the amount of people taking drugs keeps increasing. Also, substance use and drug policy are clearly in the national spotlight. In last year, Illinois became the 18th state in the US that allows people to legally process marijuana. In the history of the drug-using in Illinois, Chicago is one of the cities that has the highest volume of drug trading. Therefore, I decided to take Chicago as a sample and analyze the change of Drug cases in the recent decade. 

Inspiration

After I came with the idea to create a map showing the drug crime in Chicago, I started to do research online. Then I found the article about the war on drugs. In the article, authors connect the drug use with different factors such as the poverty level by neighborhood. Inspired by this, I decided to create a map that shows the relationship between the drug crimes that happened and police stations.

Data and Tools

I was so excited that I found the dataset of the Crimes record from 2001 to 2020 from the Chicago Data Portal. The data has 7,307,922 rows of criminal records, including information on the Crime category, the location of that crime happened, the date that crime happened, description of the crime, latitude, longitude. Aslo, from the same data website, I found the dataset of Chicago’s police stations.

The first thing I need to do was filtered out all the records about all the drugs. Since there are not too many data cleaning jobs to do, I simply open the data in Excel and filter the information that I need. At last, I categorized the cases by drug name based on the crime description. 

After I cleaned up my dataset, I imported it to Carto, a powerful web-based mapping platform. Carto is easy to get up and running – it runs in the browser and does not require coding knowledge – but also allows for significant customization using HRML and SQL.

Process

After uploading the datasets in the Carto, I created maps and began adjusting the styling. I played around different baseman’s, and finally decided to use the positron map as base since the saturation of the map is relatively low which can help the points more standing out on top of it. Then I began by displaying the criminal cases as bubbles and adding a widget to count the number of type of drug that involved in the cases. 

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After I imported all the datasets to Carto, one of my first steps was to color the bubbles by the type of the drug and reduce the size of the bubbles to better visualize the density. I also took off the stroke because there are too many drug crimes happened over 20 years, the stroke will affect the visualization. 

I also added popups on hover, and a legend. Also, I added the analyze on the right of the chart which can easily customize the bubbles showing on the chart.

Then I added other two maps as extra layers to the drug crimes map. Therefore we can easily tell the layout of the police station in the city and which part of city has more illegal drug events. Then I did some color adjusting so that the map will be more readable. The purple area is Chicago city census, the brown block is where the police station located at, and those colorful bubbles indicates the crimes involved with different kinds of drugs.

My final step for this project is I added the animation features since the dataset records the crimes happened in Chicago over 20 years.

Reflection

Along with the time goes, the number of drug crimes started to decline from 2004 after it reached the peak in 2003. However, the number of crimes started to picking up in 2020 which was the year that Illinois legalizes the use of drug.

Moreover, from the map, we can find that the communities with more reported crimes have more police station installed. And 20 years has passed, the area with high volume of crimes still remains the same. Therefore, based on what the map tells me, the area has more police stations, has more crimes. Also, more police stations build in a community do not improve the safety and security of that community.

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