
Walking The Beat – Mining Seattle's Police Report Data - ajiang
http://www.bayesimpact.org/blog/walking-the-beat.html
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devindotcom
Perhaps data mining will succeed where common sense hasn't in convincing the
East Precinct to walk the streets and parks within a couple blocks of the
station. Cal Anderson and Pike/Pine are regularly sites of hate crimes,
brawls, muggings, and shootings, but I rarely see any on-foot police presence.
Seems like it would be easy-mode patrol - grab a coffee, walk outside, and
spook a few punks into moving along instead of sticking around.

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sharkweek
Used to work on 3rd and Pine (in the offices above, not slinging on the
corner).

There were cops there all the time - but honestly, it seemed like they were
mostly just maintaining order, not stopping the dealing. The "unofficial"
rumor around the city is that the police department worked to corral most
dealing into specified locations (think: Hamsterdam) as a part of their
containment strategy. Sure they raid it once in a while to nab up some
dealers, but I'm still convinced that was just for public appearances.

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sheltgor
That may not be a bad thing... Work a few blocks over from there and the
difference is startling. Having it concentrated in one place where they can
keep an eye on it seems to me like it may be a quite effective strategy since
it would effectively keep it out of the rest of downtown.

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sharkweek
I think it's a fantastic strategy; dealers are going to deal _SOMEWHERE_
because they're meeting a massive demand; might as well keep an eye on it and
minimize violence(e.g., South Seattle)

We've gotten somewhat fortunate though, as the violence hasn't ticked upward
much at all in that area due to no turf wars cropping up in such a prominent
area. I think the city would be a lot harsher on the area if that changed.

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comrh
Awesome. Did the police department release this data willingly or from a FOIA
request? I've been trying to get this exact type of data from local police
departments but I've never seen it with Lat/Longs and clearance.

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sgk284
The Seattle PD is very open about their data. Every single beat has it's own
twitter stream of dispatches (delayed by an hour, for obvious security
reasons):
[http://www.seattle.gov/police/tweets/](http://www.seattle.gov/police/tweets/)

Whenever I hear a bunch of sirens driving by, it's great to know that in short
order I'll see what was happening in my Twitter feed.

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jonjenk
It's interesting that they delay the Twitter by an hour. You can get real time
911 info for Seattle here.

[http://www2.seattle.gov/fire/realtime911/getRecsForDatePub.a...](http://www2.seattle.gov/fire/realtime911/getRecsForDatePub.asp?action=Today&incDate=&rad1=des)

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comrh
Holy crap. Wow I have a serious respect for the Seattle PD now, that is very
open.

edit: I found out why that one is real time. It isn't Seattle PD but Seattle
Fire.
([https://twitter.com/SeattlePD/status/502651325117526016](https://twitter.com/SeattlePD/status/502651325117526016))

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ajiang
Blog post and data mining done by Jeff Wong, one of our data science mentors
who is currently a Senior Data Scientist at Netflix. His own blog is at
[http://jeffreycwong.com](http://jeffreycwong.com) \-- check it out, there are
some truly awesome pieces for data scientists.

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coin
"NULL" comes between person down/injury and robbery.

