{"id":18405,"date":"2020-06-23T11:34:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T15:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=18405"},"modified":"2020-06-23T11:34:08","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T15:34:08","slug":"the-nypd-and-summonses-for-victimless-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/labs\/the-nypd-and-summonses-for-victimless-crimes\/","title":{"rendered":"The NYPD and Summonses for Victimless Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tableau Public Lab Report by Kyle Palermo, June 23, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Background<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Criminal summonses are one of four primary enforcement actions at the NYPD\u2019s disposal (in addition to what happens off-the-books or results in death). Rather than protecting life or property, a plurality of these summonses are issued for marijuana possession or various alcohol consumption offenses (excluding the highest single offense category, federal motor vehicle violations). Looking at criminal summons data for 2019, this visualization shows that the NYPD pays a surprising amount of attention to marijuana and alcohol consumption and that their efforts to suppress these rather ordinary vices target specific neighborhoods and, overwhelmingly, people of color. Police murders remind us that no matter how innocuous the pretext, any encounter with law enforcement can turn deadly, making this small war against victimless non-crime all the more troubling.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Process Documentation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Tableau Public<\/a> is a free, cloud-based application for filtering, analyzing, and visualizing data, and is capable of handling large data sets that might choke more vanilla spreadsheet applications like Excel or Google Sheets. Rather than importing a data source, Tableau links to it and provides an interface for previewing and filtering down rows to quickly mute extraneous data without altering your source file. From there, users can create additional worksheets to explore and visualize the data, including the standard array of charts familiar to spreadsheet users and some more advanced visualizations such as packed circle charts and tree maps. Users can then aggregate their visualizations into dashboards, and all of their work is housed as a single workbook which can be saved to a profile on Tableau Public\u2019s online community<\/a>. The public version pens users into Tableau\u2019s proprietary environment, and exporting data or visualizations to other formats largely off limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n