

Crime Visualization of San Francisco - ericd
http://www.padmapper.com/crimeTest/

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pg
This is very interesting. A friend of mine who lived on Frederick St, just a
few blocks up the hill from Haight, said that crime was much lower on her
block. Her theory was that bad guys didn't like to climb hills. And in fact
there seems to be a correlation between altitude and crime rate.

There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier
neighborhoods.

But her explanation makes sense. If you're walking around looking for someone
to rob, why walk up steep hills?

~~~
rdouble
I lived on Beulah, one of the flat streets between Cole and Haight. There were
countless bums from GGP & haight street milling about my block, which was
considered "Cole Valley", a relatively yuppie neighborhood. My apartment was
burglarized and my TV was stolen. I moved up to Stanyan and Rivoli, considered
to be the same neighborhood, but straight up a very steep hill, and never saw
another human soul again.

~~~
ericd
Interesting. Maybe crime actually does flow downhill to some extent? It would
be interesting to see if there's a correlation between crime rate and relative
elevation.

~~~
iaskwhy
Completely different city but with lots of hills (seven to be precise):
Lisbon. The most dangerous areas are near the top of the hills in places like
Bairro Alto, Sé, Alfama, while the main bottom of the hill, Baixa, is much
better.

I believe Lisbon has a very low crime rate (for european standards) and my
theory for more crime happening on the higher streets is pretty simple: on the
bottom the streets are really big and there's lot of space while the streets
on the top of the hills are really small so easier to be seen by the police
when you're doing something evil.

I like thinking about these kind of relations though!

~~~
rdl
In Brazil (and probably elsewhere in South America), real estate values go
down (and thus crime goes up) the higher you go on the hills. Basically, this
is because walking up and down the hills is arduous and sucks, and thus people
try to avoid living on the hills if they possibly can. Thus you end up with
favelas.

If everyone had cars, or public transit, you would probably see better
property values on hills, like you do in SF.

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ericd
This is a new visualization layer on PadMapper (an apartment hunting site)
which shows the relative frequency of crime in different areas of San
Francisco. It's not differentiated between nonviolent crime and violent crime
currently (should be at some point). Red is bad, green is good, and nothing
means very little crime reported for that area (even better than green within
the bounds of SF, simply no data outside).

~~~
pavel_lishin
It would be nice if you could filter by the type of crime, not even
necessarily violent crime. I might care if someone's selling heroin outside my
door, or cars are being stolen, but probably wouldn't care if prostitutes are
running about or dogs are unleashed.

~~~
ericd
Good point. It currently needs to be precomputed as images, so it's hard to
make it customizable, but it probably makes sense to make a category of
unsavory crimes. I would assume that most people dislike living near the same
types of crime.

~~~
bkrausz
How are you precomputing the images? I thought GMaps provided a way to input
data and get a heatmap, but apparently I'm mistaken.

~~~
ericd
I couldn't find anything to that effect, so I wrote custom scripts. Basically,
it creates an image pixel by pixel, with the pixel value corresponding to the
crime density of that chunk of the map, blows it up, smooths it with a
Gaussian kernel, and then uses some GIS tools to warp it and chop it up into
tiles for different zoom levels.

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samps
Unrelatedly, PadMapper is excellent (better than other Craigslist mappers I
could find): it has a great filtering system, seems to fetch fresh results
more often, and can alert you about new places. I found my current place using
it.

~~~
AmericanOP
I concur. Padmapper gives me a quality of life advantage over my peers since I
can find exactly what I want and monitor for deals while they're getting the
luck of the draw off CList.

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dongle
Wow, this is excellent. I'm looking at moving to San Francisco later this year
and this is such important information. I knew that places like the Tenderloin
were dangerous, but there's an unexpected hotspot in the middle of the Mission
that I know to avoid now. Thanks.

~~~
ericd
Cool. It's available on PadMapper itself as an overlay, so you can see where
the apartment listings sit on the crime map. It's a bit buried - have to
maximize Filters and then Super Secret Advanced Features.

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stretchwithme
that is excellent. There's a 20 block area that is the reddest zone in the
city and my guess is that's the Tenderloin.

I wonder what impact an intense cleaning would have on the crime rate there.
And enforcement of simple things like public urination laws. And maybe some
decent bathrooms.

I recall the kind of things New York did to restore a sense of order. Malcolm
Gladwell talked about them in the Tipping Point. Surely similar measures would
improve the crime situation in SF.

~~~
hugh3
Most definitely, but you'll never get a Rudy Giuliani figure elected as mayor
of San Francisco, at least not in the foreseeable future.

My prediction: sometime in the next 30 years the tech industry will have
drifted elsewhere, and San Franscisco will be the new Detroit. Right now it's
a mixture of the sublime and the awful, but the sublime can always pack up and
move to Portland/Austin/Seattle.

~~~
stretchwithme
Most of what is sublime about San Francisco can't move.

But you're right. People in San Francisco don't seem to value public order
enough to take the actions required to establish it.

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arethuza
About 10 years ago I had to go to SF for a week at short notice and left the
booking of the hotel to our office manager - big mistake.

It was on Geary, and a bit of a dive. First thing that surprised me was when I
got into the taxi at the airport and the driver asked "Do you really want to
go there?".

Next sign that things were not too good was when the chap at reception said -
"Do not walk along Geary to get to Union square, walk two blocks up the hill,
along and back down to Union square.

Of course, late one night I decided to walk directly back, after all how can
it be (feeling reasonably safe going out in Glasgow - which is practically a
war zone late at night). I only did this once - getting a taxi back after
that!

Turns out the hotel I was staying in is right in the orange zone there.

~~~
nailer
I stayed in a Youth Hostel right in Tenderloin. The crack dealers I met were
pretty much only interested in you if you were either interested in buying
crack, or were obviously scared of them (at which point they'd make fun of you
- hey I would too).

The big surprise for me was how dirty downtown San Francisco was compared to
LA. I'd never seen someone actually take a dump in the middle of a city
sidewalk, or piss a level down into a train station before SF, and I haven't
seen it since. My Full House illusions were well and truly shattered.

~~~
arethuza
I asked the taxi driver on the way to the airport if things were always like
that and he gave an explanation about adjacent police districts taking it in
turns to move these folks from one district to another - apparently this had
just happened so things were a bit more lively than normal.

I learned the lesson and booked my own hotel the nice time I visited - stayed
somewhere _very_ nice right next to Union Square. :-)

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chaosmachine
I can't be the only one who took one look at this and thought: Hey, that's
SimCity!

<http://imgur.com/V2Bvo.png>

~~~
utexaspunk
Looks like the City of San Francisco and I employ similar strategies for
fighting crime:

[http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=CW1yGmTpak6DFVJmQAIdKAe0-CkhAGkAbZqFgDH_rXbwZxNQSg&q=jones+%26+eddy+San+Francisco,+CA&sll=37.77965,-122.414228&sspn=0.016332,0.033023&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Jones+St+%26+Eddy+St,+San+Francisco,+California+94102&ll=37.783901,-122.412887&spn=0.008166,0.016512&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=37.783883,-122.412997&panoid=rO4uBWOPetgycW1rNGUFUA&cbp=12,122.62,,0,7.51)

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mikeyk
I made CrimeDeskSF
(<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/crimedesksf/id339706696?mt=8>) to visualize
some of this data on the iPhone, including a mostly-gimmicky-but-kinda-fun
augmented reality view (drug bust 100ft away!). I'm using the datasf.org
datasets for mine (not sure how they compare to the crimespotting ones, or if
they're the same).

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donaldc
Is this normalized by the population density or foot traffic in an area? If
not, it's going to be hard to use to estimate personal risk.

~~~
ericd
It isn't. My theory is that crime density by land area alone probably gives a
decent estimate of how the area feels to live in. IE: if there's an assault or
robbery every week in a one block area where you live, it's going to feel like
a seedy place to live regardless of your personal risk of being involved in a
crime.

I doubt there's an objectively right answer as to how to best normalize this -
I think it just matters that it be understood by the user what it means. There
are a number of ways to normalize it depending on what you care about.

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kgermino
Very interesting. I would love to see someone build something similar for
other cities, perhaps overlaid with Points of Interest and mass transit lines.
I think it could be made to be useful for tourists and people who are new to
an area.

However even if it can't be made into a usable product it'd be very
interesting to see.

~~~
ericd
I used to have markers representing high-rated yelp locations on PadMapper,
but they weren't too happy about having their data cached (which is necessary
in order to make it smooth), so now it has to be pulled manually by the user.

Transit lines are something that should go on PadMapper at some point. I hope
Google opens up their transit layer sooner rather than later.

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mturmon
The LAPD has a much more informative interface

<http://www.lapdcrimemaps.org/>

which separates out crime by types. You can clearly see patterns such as GTA's
(car theft) along major streets in Hollywood.

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steadicat
All I knew about SF crime was that the Tenderloin felt quite dodgy when I
visited. So I opened the map ready to be suprised. Instead it turns out my
feelings were right. Looks like the crime rate in SF is an inverse function of
the distance from the Tenderloin.

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enf
If you want more details, sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org has them, or you can
download the raw data from datasf.org. The hot spot at 16th Street BART is
drug dealers and in practice there is no reason not to go there.

~~~
dongle
I'm going to have to disagree. Its accessibility via the muni and the bart,
combined with the proximity to the hard-drug areas of town means that there
are a number of quick and dirty smash-n-grab robberies of transient ne'er-do-
wells. Admittedly I'm biased because I experienced a single one of those
datapoints first-hand.

~~~
enf
OK, I shouldn't have dismissed it so quickly... there are some real issues
there too. But I have spent a lot of time there without worrying about my
safety.

------
larsalan
[http://www.floatingsheep.org/2010/06/mapping-crime-in-
city-b...](http://www.floatingsheep.org/2010/06/mapping-crime-in-city-by-
bay.html)

//related

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chaostheory
So most of Hunter's Point is crime free? Is this data correct?

~~~
ericd
This is why I'd like to do violent/nonviolent versions. I've heard it
described that the Tenderloin has a lot of non violent crime, and that
Hunter's Point has much more violent crime. Ultimately, I'd rather be in the
Tenderloin if that's the case.

I believe the data is correct, but I'm not sure what the SF police's data
policies are. There could be some withholding, etc. The data comes from
<http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org/>.

~~~
arebop
The San Francisco Police link to
<http://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco> from their page at
<http://sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1618> which has some discussion of their
data policies.

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klochner
No luck getting the presidio data?

~~~
dougmccune
The presidio is actually a government property, so any crime within the
presidio is actually a federal crime and is reported differently. Beware of
committing any crime there, the consequences are far more drastic.

~~~
ericd
Thanks for clearing that up.

