Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Useful Map To Know Your Police Beat, Recent Crime


A reader just alerted us to this handy google map they created, showing all the police beats in Uptown, and the recent shootings. Sadly, we fear this map will have to be updated even more in the coming weeks. Check it out here.

6 comments:

  1. The comments on the March 13th shooting are wrong. The police were on the scene shortly after the shooting. They also interviewed a few witnesses. Not sure whether the caught the shooter though.

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  2. Bravo, Uptown Crimefighter! Do you intend to keep this up and send posts to Uptown Update? I hope so. Once we have a bit more data, there are some cool things I could do to determine statistical associations between different crime "variables." Anyone else have ideas? Way to go!!!!!

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  3. @saskia: EveryBlock Chicago has pretty detailed 'statistical' information.

    chicago.everyblock.com/crime

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  4. Thanks. But you can also investigate statistical relationships between geo-spatial variables (i.e., where are certain crimes more likely to happen?) and relationships between time of day or victim characteristics. If Uptown Crimefighter is willing to track this information, it makes it much easier to do this kind of analysis than with the police data because it is broken down by beats, etc. If you are interested in "Uptown" as a community (and we are) what this person is doing just makes it easier and faster to do.
    You might even be able to "predict" which areas are the most likely to have violence at which time. Criminologist do stuff like this all the time but it is not like residents get access to that in real time so that they can make some use of it.

    Anywhoo...I am intrigued!

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  5. Oh. I forgot to mention the downside. The more data you have, the more it is possible to do the analysis. However, more "data" actually means more crime...

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