TGIF Chula Vista, It’s Crime Minimum Day

Our resident data slinger sent me an initial analysis of time series data for specific crime hot spots in San Diego, and the results are interesting.

Rather than look at the whole of the region at once, we’ve identified specific high intensity areas, and are doing time-series analysis for them independently. The major areas are: North Park, Chula Vista, Gaslamp and Pacific Beach. Since each of these areas is very different, they have different crime profiles, so we’re analyzing them separately. Here is the map for the Chula Vista analysis area:

Screen Shot 2013-03-29 at 11.30.34 AM

 

Joe, our analysts, grouped all crime incidents for the years 2008 and 2009 by day of week:

CV Hotspot DOW

Surprisingly, the fewest incidents were reported on Fridays.

This result looks very suspicious to me. I’d expect that since most crime in the region is assaults related to nightlife, Friday would be a peak, not a minimum. We’ll need to do more exploration to determine if this is a correct result, but there is at least one encouraging clue: the curve descends fairly smoothly to Friday, without a discontinuous break that you might  expect if there were a flaw in the data.

Joe and I wil be doing similar analysis for other hotspots and will report on how crime varies by type, time and date for each of the major analysis areas.