Philadelphia’s Crime Stats of 2020


Lab Reports, Maps, Visualization

Introduction

For this article, I focused on showing Police Incident data of 2020 for Philadelphia. Using the Ring Neighbor App, I have recently noticed many incidents such as package thieves or gunshots in the City of Philadelphia, and I got concerned about the ongoing crimes in the city. Philadelphia has marked 2020 as its most violent year in three decades, reported by Philly Trib.

Inspiration

I looked into our blog to see past examples and found several that are inspirational for this article. I would like to show a map with incidents and also showing other data such as police districts or tourist attractions.

  1. DRUG-RELATED ARRESTS IN CHICAGO by Sofia Ni https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/drug-related-arrests-in-chicago/
  2. SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS IN NYC by Anna Size https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/school-improvement-projects-in-nyc/

Process

Step 1 Data Gathering and Setup

All of my data were download from OpenDataPhilly. I have downloaded the Crime Incident dataset, Police Districts dataset, and City Landmark dataset. The primary dataset I used is the Crime Incident dataset, and I used the other two as complementary data. The Crime Incident dataset has 138,780 rows of crime incident records, including homicide, rape, Aggravated Assault with/without firearms, theft, burglary, and other Assaults.

I Imported the files(CSV files) to Carto. The Crime Incident dataset was easy to connect, and all data show up on the map. I had a difficult time with City Landmark; the nodes or boundaries did not show up.

Crime Incident dataset
Police District, I added district number
This dataset is very similar to Police District Dataset. I tried using Polygon and manually add in the data, still did not work.

Step 2 Visualization

The Crime Incidents map was hectic due to the amount of data it contained. I started to work with style to distinguish the incidents and added a filter to filter the incidents.

Adjusted the style. Crime incidents by color

I added widget to show summary for the crimes within the whole city.

Next, I incorporated the Police District dataset with the Crime Incidents dataset. I added a filter to the Crime Incident data to only show homicide so it’s easier to read and a filter for Police District to narrow down the location. With this map, you can analyze each district’s safety and incident data.

Filter by Column Value, Only showing the crime I am looking for. Example: Homicide
Q: How to only show data within that purple region(District 16)?

Finally, I did an animated map/timeline showing the location crime that happened during 2020. It’s nice that you can click on a specific crime to filter the map.

This map showing crime incidents in the Center City of Philadelphia

Reflection

I did not expect this amount of crimes, and hopefully, it will improve in the future. From my perspective, Carto is an excellent tool to learn, but I think there are some limitations or might be me lacking the knowledge. I ran into trouble when I only want to show data within a district, and the color selection is limited. I would like to figure out how to add the Landmark dataset into this map for further work. I had a hard time trying to make sure all widgets show up at the end. Overall, the Carto learning experience was great; I did watch some Youtube videos that taught me how to use the filter plus the analysis, and Carto’s instruction was easy to follow.

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