

PadMapper Maps Out Crime Levels of Cities - ericd
http://lifehacker.com/5663251/padmapper-now-displays-heatmaps

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tptacek
I'm not too sure about the visualization they're using; I see red in the
heatmap for San Francisco, but Austin and Englewood on my Chicago map are
yellow/green --- nothing is red. There is no neighborhood in San Francisco
that has, for instance, a recurrant problem with dog fighting, as these
Chicago neighborhoods do.

I wonder if they're averaging something out over the city and diluting the
scores that way.

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defen
Is dogfighting the kind of crime people are worried about though? I suppose
it's an indicator that a neighborhood is home to undesirable residents, but
I'd imagine most people are more worried about theft, vandalism, and violent
crime.

It's not integrated with Craigslist but this site is pretty good at showing
details: <http://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco>

Funny story, the first time I looked up my address on there I was horrified by
the number of "public urination" citations - it was ridiculously high even by
San Francisco standards. Then I remembered that Bay to Breakers had gone by my
apartment 3 days previously.

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tptacek
Yes, I'm using it as a synecdoche for "intense gang violence".

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ricaurte
It would be even more informative if the map could be adjusted for population
density.

Compare two neighborhoods: Neighborhood A has a population of 100 and crime
rate of 1 per month. Neighborhood B has a population of 10000 and crime rate
of 1 per week.

Assuming the crimes are equal, in neighborhood B you are ~4% as likely to be a
victim of a crime as you would in the smaller neighborhood A. But in the
current map, neighborhood B would look like it has a bigger crime problem.

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ericd
Hm... What I really need is foot traffic - Commercial areas have a huge amount
of foot traffic but very low population density.

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ricaurte
Foot traffic would be great for places like suburban malls or the weekends,
but is less relevant for things like burglaries and car thefts (unless its
burglaries at businesses). For city centers, worker population density would
work just as well during the week, since workers are going to be the most
likely to be in an area from 8am-6pm.

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rufugee
Anyone know where you can get data to feed something like this? I've been
wanting to do a visualization for my current city, but don't know where to go
about getting the info and our police department is far from technical...

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ericd
Yep, as mentioned in the article, the data is from SpotCrime.

