Crime Per Person

As noted in an earlier post, Kansas City Missouri has opened access to their crime data. It’s tabular, but contains address locations.

We used the addresses in the crime data to map their locations. The map on the right-hand side of the following image show the locations of 98,325 crime incidences occurring between January 1st and October 24th.

After mapping (geocoding) the records we compared crime density to population density on a per square-mile basis.

The comparison is not conclusive, but it does indicate that, generally speaking, areas with higher population densities also have higher crime densities.

To account for the possible relationship between population density and crime, we created another map by dividing the crime density by the population density (on a square mile basis). The result of this is a map that puts to pattern the per-person crime rate.

Looking at crime-per person reveals a very different pattern from the original crime-density map—one in which the central city looks much safer. In this case, the areas around the airport and the east-bottoms stand out as locations where a person is most prone to crime within the city.

No doubt, there’s a bunch of ways to spin and criticize the methodology used herein. That said, there’s no denying that mapping crime data, or any other type of phenomena, is never as simple as dropping the raw data onto a map, pointing to the blobs that stand out, and claiming you’ve figured it out.

Background map source: Esri.
Population statistics source: US Census Bureau, 2010 Census.
Crime statistics source: The City of Kansas City Missouri.

Volker Temporal Crime Map

Click the image below to open an interactive crime map of K.C. MO’s Volker neighborhood. After the web map opens, use the slider bar at the bottom of the display to adjust the date range of the crimes drawn in the map. Click points in the map to get descriptive information about each crime.

The crime data used in this map created by KC Mapping & GIS was provided by data.kcmo.org. Other than changing a few field names and filtering what information is contained in the popups, the data has not been altered.

The crimes shown on the map occurred between Jan. 1 to Aug. 16, 2013.

Crime Patterns

Three density maps of crime occurring within the Volker neighborhood between Jan. 1 through Aug. 30, 2013. (Data source: data.kcmo.org.)

Map one: crime density between 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. (Daytime crime.)

Map two: crime density between 4:00 pm to midnight. (Evening and early-night crime.)

Map three: crime density between midnight to 8:00. (Late night, early-morning crime.

Homicide Patterns

This map represents a sample of homicide data collected from August 2011 to the present. The general location of each homicide is shown as a small black dot. The boundary around each dot reflects how many homicides are nearby–smaller areas have more homicides nearby, larger areas have fewer nearby.