Feeling safe in a neighboorhood is important to quality of life. If we can understand where crime is occuring in a city and the seasonal trends of crime, we can make decisions about where to live, when to take protective measures on our property, and where to allocate resources in order to minimize victimization. To assist citizens, policy makers, and law enforcement in this understanding, this data visualization app will allow users to explore crimes across Vancouver neighboorhoods and see the crime trends within specific neighboorhoods of interest.
The dataset that we choose to visualize is a public dataset that can be downloaded from the Vancouver Police Department's Open Data: https://geodash.vpd.ca/opendata/. It is a collection of types, locations, dates and times of crimes occurred in City of Vancouver for the past 16 years. The earliest date in the dataset is January 1, 2003, and the latest date is October 31, 2019.
This dataset is available to the public and no special permit or registration is required. As it contains temporal-spatial information of crimes, it can be a great guidance to policy makers for laying out community development plans. As an individual living in Vancouver like ourselves, it can also serve as a reference for selecting residence.
There are 622,221 crime records in this dataset, and each crime record contains: (TYPE, YEAR, MONTH, DAY, HOUR, MINUTE, HUNDRED_BLOCK, NEIGHBOURHOOD, X, Y) columns . (TYPE) specifies 11 types of crimes (‘Break and Enter Commercial', 'Break and Enter Residential/Other', 'Homicide', 'Mischief', 'Offence Against a Person', 'Other Theft', 'Theft from Vehicle', 'Theft of Bicycle', 'Theft of Vehicle', 'Vehicle Collision or Pedestrian Struck (with Fatality)', 'Vehicle Collision or Pedestrian Struck (with Injury)'), and (YEAR, MONTH, DAY, HOUR and MINUTE) columns specify the date and time when the reported crime occurred. To indicate the location of the crimes, we have (HUNDRED_BLOCK and NEIGHBORHOOD). (X and Y) provides the coordinates in UTM Zone 10 format and will need to be converted into longitude and latitude if we want to render a map with GeoJSON.
As many of our classmates come from outside Vancouver, it will be very helpful if we can create an APP that helps them choose a safe neighbourhood for their stay in Vancouver. Depending on each person's life style (ie. jugging at night, driving a vehicle...etc), we also want to provide suggestions on a safer location and time for doing what they like. The information above can be useful to local people, too, when it's time to make the big decision and purchase a property. In summary:
- Which neighbourhoods in Vancouver should one look for housing if one wishes to minimize exposure to criminal activity?
This APP can also serve as a visual assistance to policy makers and law enforcement. If resources have been invested into reducing a certain crime types, they need to see whether the trend of that crime changes. As the statistics of the crime data is aggregated neibourhood by neighbourhood, the trend in crime types is a good indicator for what should be included in the community development plans. In summary:
- When and where the Vancouver Police Department should have more police portals?
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Moving to Vancouver
Mariara is moving to Vancouver but she didn’t know which neighborhood is safe for her to live. She is right now in the process of house/apartment hunting, and she usually gets off work at 6 pm. When she logs onto the APP, she can see when, where types of crime are occuring. She can see all the neighborhoods and can filter by different years, months and times. She can see the overall safety level in Vancouver.
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Chief of the Vancouver Police Department
The Chief of the Vancouver Police Department wants to manage the police portals more efficiently to let police portals get to the crime scene as soon as possible. The Chief wants to be able to choose different districts(neighborhoods) in a dataset to compare the crime type and locations in different periods and find the most effective way of arranging the police portals. When the Chief logs on to the APP, an overview of all neighborhoods with all kinds of crimes showed up. The Chief can filter out neighborhoods and different times, so that when the Chief compares with the police portals schedule and locations, the Chief can adjust them accordingly. Hence, the Vancouver Police Department can get to a crime scene faster.