Criminal Analysis: Data Search (part 1)

Now that we have our crime data, lets work on gathering the other data I wrote down during the previous Planning post. Part 1 of Data Search will focus on our Map Data branch in the project plan.

Map Data

Boundary Data

Using the same Open Data website, I just queried for DC boundary and got the following https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/washington-dc-boundary.

This page provides the spatial boundary of Washington DC. We can see the interactive map what the data will produce.

Ward Data

Searching for Ward data gave me several results (ref: https://opendata.dc.gov/search?q=ward) so I took the latest date (2012). This tells us that the boundaries for Ward may change over time. The instance prior to 2012 was 2002 so it doesnt change often. I might be inclined to see what the differences are but for the purpose of this project, I’ll just use the most recent standard.

https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/ward-from-2012

Looking at the attribute information for this data, it contains alot of demographic information, which could be used for something during the analysis.

Precinct Data

Police Districts

While searching for police precincts, I got two results, Police Districts and Police Service Areas (PSAs). Police Districts are a higher level aggregation of the PSAs so I made sure to capture the feature and update my project plan.

https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/police-districts

Police Service Areas (PSA)

The Police Service Areas are smaller jurisdictions. This fidelity can help provide a granular distribution of incidents throughout the city.

https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/police-service-areas

Zip Code

They had zip code spatial references. Looking at their interactive map, it looks like there are a lot of holes for carved out zip code regions. I’ll have to investigate this further with data. A lot of the areas are under federal jurisdiction (federal vs city property) so that may be the distinguishing factor.

https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/zip-codes

Police Stations

I think the location of police station could be useful in assessing the distance of incidents from police stations. The data will also let us know if incidents may have been recorded at the police station rather than where an incident occurred. We might also be able to describe the types of incidents each police station encounters and what the distribution of that data shows.

https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/police-stations

Schools

While searching for schools, I got a couple results. One for public schools, charter schools, transformation schools and summer public schools. Initially I will capture public and charter schools for my project. I will keep in mind that there are a couple of additional options to explore. It could be that the summer public schools and transformation schools have some over lap with public schools, which would require verification through cross referencing.

The location of a school may help us understand the distribution and proximity of a school to a particular subset of incidents. Though the type of incidents and location of a school may not be correlated.

The summer school location could be useful for measuring incident activity during the summer months if there is some loose relationship of incident type to school location.

GeoJSON Links

For each of the spatial features mentioned above, I have compiled the GeoJSON URLs from the pages into a script for later use. Once the script is posted on my GitHub (link below), you will have access to the information gathered.

Planning Progress

I will reference back to my plan and update what we have so far. Using XMind’s icons, I put task completion status next to the data I have. I have expanded a couple areas to add some granularity. If during the process I expand or modify my plan, I should make sure my plan reflects those changes. Project documentation is a good skill to have. If you document properly as you go, it will save you time and patience later.